Lynne Ramsay announced herself as a director to take notice of in her first feature, which sees a naïve young lad navigate the squalid streets of 1973 Glasgow and the poor youth around him.
James Gillespie (William Eadie) is 12 years old. The world he knew is changing. Haunted by a secret, he has become a stranger in his own family and is drawn to the canal where he creates a world of his own. He finds an awkward tenderness with Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen), a vulnerable 14-year-old expressing a need for love in all the wrong ways, and befriends Kenny (John Miller), who possesses an unusual innocence despite the harsh surroundings. What is so striking and eerie about ‘Ratcatcher’ is Ramsay’s brilliant way of rendering a trance-like, epiphanic child’s-eye-view of a hundred little things that present themselves to James’s senses.
UK 1999 Lynne Ramsay 94m
