A swan crashes through a windshield outside a zoo, kills two women, and sets their widowed husbands on a shared path toward decay, decomposition, and the paintings of Vermeer.

A ZED & TWO NOUGHTS (1985) follows twin zoologists Oswald and Oliver Deuce, played by real-life twins Brian and Eric Deacon. Grief curdles into obsession. The brothers begin filming the time-lapse rot of animal carcasses, working up the evolutionary ladder from an apple to a zebra. At the same time, both fall for Alba Bewick, the surviving driver, played by Andréa Ferréol. Alba loses one leg in the crash and later has the other removed for the sake of symmetry.

Peter Greenaway directs from his own script, staging every frame like a painting, obsessed with symmetry, decay, and the Dutch masters. Gerard Thoolen plays Van Meegeren, the Vermeer-obsessed surgeon who wields the saw. Joss Ackland plays the zoo's keeper, and Frances Barber plays a woman literally named Venus de Milo. Sacha Vierny's photography and Michael Nyman's score give the whole thing the precision of clockwork.

It is a film about death as process rather than event, shot with the cold symmetry of a diagram. Greenaway treats the body, animal or human, as something to be studied, timed, and composed. Few films have made rot look this beautiful, or this funny.