BURKE & HARE

In Edinburgh, in 1828, there are two sides to society: men living in dirty hovels and grave robbing to make a living; and rich men going to the brothels. Meanwhile, the doctors dine together and drink wine. Surgeon Dr Robert Knox needs bodies for dissection to satisfy the training needs of his medical students. As only hanging victims may be used, bodies are in short supply. In order to serve the greater good of medical science he employs grave-robbers Burke and Hare to supply fresh corpses for his anatomical lectures at the medical academy. The authorities turn a blind eye knowing that stemming the crime would lessen the medical training.The pair of "resurrectionists" are paid £7 10s for their first body – a truly large sum at that time.

The students in the anatomy theatre appreciate Knox's lectures and demonstrations. However, when graveyard supplies run low, the industrious pair turn to murder to keep the business going and simply claim to have robbed the bodies. They start with the poor people who co-habit their lodging house on West Port, and these people might have legitimately died. Due to greed they gradually get bolder picking younger victims. Their wives are aware of the murders and indeed encourage and watch the crimes.

But when Mrs Hare brings Daft Jamie home to murder things start to go wrong as Jamie is well known. When his body reaches Knox it is seen Jamie has been in a fight. Two of the city guard arrive looking for Jamie. Knox destroys Jamie's head and tells the guards it is a boy killed in a factory accident.

The local brothel burns down and the girls need to find new accommodation. Prostitute Marie and her friend meet Burke in a bar who offers them accommodation. Marie fails to turn up for her rendezvous with her medical student lover, who is shocked when he sees her next on the anatomy table. He asks to speak to Knox. Knox tells the student that he did an autopsy and she died of alcoholism.

The student sneaks into Knox's private dissection room at night. He then goes to Madame Thompson and tells her Marie is dead. She directs him to a tavern in the West Port. Meanwhile, in the tavern Burke meets an old match-seller, Mary Docherty. He takes her back to his house at Tanners Close to join their Halloween party. A drunken fight breaks out as the student arrives having tracked them down. He calls the City Guard who break up the fight and find the dead body of Mary Docherty.

A voice over explains what then happened to each character.

Burke and Hare's crimes unravel when a murder is discovered during a drunken fight, leading to the intervention of the City Guard and a voice over revealing each character's fate.

The ending ties up the fates of all involved, exposing the full consequences of greed and moral compromise. The grim resolution underscores how the pursuit of scientific progress and easy profit corrupted everyone involved, from the grave robbers to the complicit surgeons and authorities. By capping the film with a voice over, it grounds its black comedy in historical infamy.