A Zed & Two Noughts in the simplest of terms is about people desperately searching for meaning in life and death. Oliver and Oswald Deuce are twins. Both are zoologists, both work at the same zoo, and both lose their wives in a freak car accident on Swann′s Way-caused by a falling swan. The driver of the car, Alba Bewick, loses a leg in the wreck, and opts to have the other removed for the sake of symmetry. She becomes the scientific muse for the twins in one of Greenaway′s most eclectic and morbidly humorous films, increasingly convincing even as it becomes more absurd. Set in and around a decaying zoo populated by amputee animals, Greenaway creates some of his most beautiful compositions and packs them full of rotting flesh, disintegration, maggots and otherwise horrifying imagery. Loaded as it is with artistic and literary references that could easily muddle the film but never do, A Zed & Two Noughts finds a beauty and humor in death that goes hand and hand with its ugliness and sorrow.