Creatures of Habit.

Another grim and bloody tale from Scotland? Who would have thought?

In a break from tradition with recent Scottish films like Ratcatcher and Orphans, Beautiful Creatures manages to show us nice-looking houses, attractive women and comprehensible accents. Unfortunately for Scotland, however, the film still manages to portray everyone from that part of the world as horrible, violent and selfish.

Unfortunately, that is, unless the Scots are actively trying to scare foreigners away. Take the opening scene, for instance, set on a train, in which a man and woman argue about the former's missing golf clubs. A standard marital woe, perhaps. But in this case, the discussion is ended when the man, Tony (Iain Glenn), loudly proclaims, "I swear to God I'm gonna drink your blood!" before picking up a large object with which to clobber his spouse, Dorothy (Susan Lynch), who then flees in terror for her life. Ultimately thwarted in his attempt to bash her brains out, Tony instead goes back to Dorothy's apartment and throws paint on her clothes, strings up her dog and deep-fries her underwear, threatening to do worse if the golf clubs don't show up. As it turns out, these aren't just any golf clubs. Still, the fact that no one appears to find Tony's behavior woefully out of place seems troubling, to say the least.

Dorothy wisely decides to leave town, but she is delayed on her way when her dog goes to the aid of another woman being brutally attacked by a boyfriend. Though the dog poses little threat to the savagely drunken man (Tom Mannion), the heroic canine inspires his owner to get in on the action, and she whacks the man, named Brian, with a metal pipe, thus saving the lovely Petula (Rachel Weisz) from near-certain strangulation.

Since no one in Scotland apparently does anything about domestic violence, Petula refuses to take Brian to the hospital, fearing she'll have to shoulder all the blame. Instead, she and Dorothy drag the unconscious lout back to the latter's apartment, where they toss him in the bathtub to sleep it off. Meanwhile, Dorothy gives Petula a haircut, and the two roll up a big fat joint.

When Brian eventually recovers, he staggers to his feet, slips, falls, then goes into a seizure, utters a few German swear words and dies. It's here that the audience must take the film's biggest leap of faith: Despite the death being clearly accidental, and the earlier head trauma an obvious case of self-defense, Petula and Dorothy are absolutely convinced that they'll go to jail if the body is discovered. Therefore, instead of doing what sane people would do and call an ambulance or coroner, they decide to go to ridiculous lengths to hide the body and cover their tracks. This scenario, of course, gets progressively worse once the police, in the form of a sleazy detective inspector (Alex Norton), become involved. And it isn't too long before Petula's oily boss (and the victim's brother), Ronnie (Maurice Roeves, best known as the pint-swilling God in The Acid House), inserts himself into the situation. Not to mention the return of Tony and those pesky missing golf clubs. Before the situation is resolved, there will be more bodies to hide.

More than anything else, Beautiful Creatures recalls Danny Boyle's Shallow Grave, minus the frenetic editing and techno score -- a good sign, since Boyle's obsession with freneticism and style ultimately proved to be his undoing in the ambitious failures A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach (Beautfiul Creatures was produced by DNA, a company cofounded by longtime Boyle collaborator Andrew Macdonald). For Rachel Weisz, best known as the ditzy object of desire in The Mummy (a role she'll reprise in the forthcoming sequel), this film is a coming-out party. Yes, she was in Enemy at the Gates, but still primarily as an object of desire. Here, she takes control. Costar Susan Lynch doesn't have Weisz's glamour, and thus may be stymied in Hollywood, but she's easily the stronger actor of the two.

The relentless brutality and nastiness of most of the film's characters may make Beautiful Creatures an uncomfortable film for some viewers, and it doesn't necessarily aim any higher than the thriller level, so those who require their violence to have some kind of redeeming thematic merit should probably stay away. For folks who like a genuinely tense suspense film with heavy doses of black humor, however, this ought to do it. Screenwriter Simon Donald has loaded the film with some wonderfully twisted throwaway gags, like the crazy old beachcomber explaining to a young boy that fishermen like to have sex with halibuts, or the policeman who thinks Dorothy is about to jump off a bridge and orders her to go home and overdose on pills instead.

As for first-time feature director Bill Eagles, he should be getting a lot more work from here on out. And while one hates to generalize about all films that emanate from one particular country, the most recent imports suggest that Scotland is becoming quite the spawning ground for some truly dark and inspired cinematic storytelling. You have been warned.