A Zed & Two Noughts 1985

Twin zoologists, Oswald Deuce and Oliver Deuce, work at a zoo and are suddenly tested by tragedy when both their wives are killed in a car crash caused by a swan smashing through the windshield. The driver, Alba Bewick, survives but loses a leg in the accident. At the zoo, Venus de Milo, a prostitute and storyteller who plies her trade around the grounds, begins to reach out to the brothers in an attempt to help them cope with their loss. The mood surrounding the Deuces shifts from grief to a disturbing preoccupation with life, growth, and decay.

As the brothers wrestle with their trauma, Oswald and Oliver become increasingly obsessed with images that track birth, transformation, and decay. They study origins of life and begin making time-lapse videos of decomposing matter, starting with a green apple that rots before their lens. Their fascination deepens, and their subjects move from fruit to biopsies of living creatures, including prawns and eventually larger, more complex animals. Throughout this unsettling journey, the film threads in excerpts from Sir David Attenborough’s Life on Earth, woven in a way that mirrors the brothers’ escalating fixation and serves as a stark contrast to their own creeping detachment. The relationship with Alba grows darker as they cross personal boundaries, and Venus de Milo watches closely, sensing how their obsessions evolve.

The Deuces’ fixation bleeds into their interactions with Alba. They become entangled with her on an intimate level, while Alba herself becomes a focal point of the experiments conducted by her surgeon. The doctor ultimately amputates Alba’s other leg, claiming the operation will relieve spinal stress, but his true motive is to use Alba as a living subject for recreations of Johannes Vermeer paintings; Venus de Milo participates in this macabre project as well, blurring the lines between art, science, and obsession.

As the narrative escalates, the brothers’ work edges toward a high-stakes, almost ritual negotiation with Alba herself. The project seems to offer the only emotional investment they can muster, and Alba appears to volunteer as the final subject to be photographed in decay. Yet Alba’s family intervenes, forcing the twins to rethink their plan. With no way to claim Alba as the ultimate specimen, they pivot to a finale that revolves around returning to the field from Alba’s childhood and setting up the equipment to capture their own decomposition. Their meticulous setup is consumed by a massive snail infestation, which covers the gear and the bodies, slowly shorting out the entire apparatus and bringing their grand, controversial project to an abrupt halt.

In the end, the film frames a delicate balance between science, memory, and the impulse to control nature. The Deuce brothers push the boundaries of observation to the point where life, decay, and artistry collide, and Alba becomes both the catalyst and casualty of their descent. The interplay of haunting imagery, religiously quiet moments, and clinical dissection crafts a troubling meditation on how people process grief and how far they will go to preserve or destroy what remains after loss.