Un Zievereir Lynne Ramsay is really quite talented. The playful opening sequence shows off her gifts, but the darkness that awaits seems to be where her true talent lies. A touching horrible tale so saturated in tragedy that I felt almost numb by the end. A better film than intruiging 'Morven Callar' and the excellent 'We Need to Talk About Kevin', she remains a bright light in style and subject.

Ajit Tiwari The first frame shows, a 12-year-old boy in the living room with a curtain tightly wrapped around his head. There is a deep silence; it could be a dream or a nightmare. Ratcatcher's first scene will make you absorbed and convinced that this movie is poetry of a very different nature than the one often gets served in the cinema. As her debut film, Lynne Ramsay is a wonderful proof there is always a room for poignant & reality centered movies, than British films in recent years were anything but doped gangster stories and sultry comedies.Despite the fact that it is a poorly implemented anti-idyllic Glasgow district, which frames the story, it's more of a psychological than a social realism that make up the film's thematic background. We follow and experience the movie with and through James, who lives with his mother, stepfather and two sisters. They all dream of leaving the growing slums. Poverty, drunken parents and neglected children are the neighborhood's reality. The garbage men have been on strike for so long that backyards were bacteriological war zones of rotting waste and rats in every corner, do not make things better. James managed, however, to get the time to go out. But one day because of James, his friend drowns accidentally in the dirty channel that runs like a festering wound through neighborhood.No one else knows about the accident, and James is hiding the secret to himself. The soundtrack gives an elegant alternation of dreamy noise, real sounds and silence, mowing between the picturesque and close cropped suggestive images pulls us from the beginning all the way into James' experience of the world. William Eadie is a true find for the role. His withdrawn and cautious attempt of contact, along with the mixture of guilt and innocence is portrayed matchlessly. Ramsay's instruction is nothing less than masterful, like Eadie's performance backed him up by the film's other actors.Ratcatcher is one of those films that, at the outset not to promise much about where it wants to go, constantly taking the audience with its new roads. James isolates himself from his family and finds a form of friendship with the weird neighbor boy Kenny and with the slightly older, unrestrained Margaret Anne instead. Margaret Anne, who puts her body to the neighborhood kids, James first sexual experiments, where she finds the tenderness and honesty of James, which she has not experienced before. James feels same with her. The film's portrayal of James' psychological life is unique and challenging without being conclusive.James dreams of going to the outskirts of Glasgow, he ends up there one day by chance. There is the new settlement, which the family has been given to the view to move into by the municipality. Out there sparkles with light and color. Grain in the fields, mature harvesting, and the sky is deep blue. One senses a little too obvious that this is where it all will end soon. The symbolism is immaculate as Ramsay applies her grip in an incredibly sophisticated way.

prashin007 i saw this film last night on criterion and couldn't help but notice it's curious similarities with David Gordon green's highly inventive but slightly over-rated "george Washington". Terrence Alick has indeed casted a very long shadow on today's young film-makers. the key for them is to, like Terrence Malick, devoid their films of intellectual and emotional pornography. similar to works of Terrence Alick and other 70's filmmakers in general, this film is just another one of the films that are adding on resurgence of 70's type personal cinema (and my favorite type at that, the slow and lyrical films devoid of over-bearing plot). i think Lynne Ramsay has been in some ways been unfairly overlooked by critics. but she is going to go far, you can just tell with some people. for those who liked this might wanna check out: anything by Terrence Malick, David Gordon green, Kim Ki-duk, Errol morris, Hans Petter Moland, "the return" by Andrei Zvyagintsev and classic McCabe and Mrs. miller.i'm sure i'm missing a lot of names but these film explore in someways similar narrative style.

juanathan This is more of a 7.5/10 Lynn Ramsay made a promising debut with this feature. It is the typical first feature. They make an above average movie where they can later improve on their techniques to create a "great" film.I have minor faults with this film. The score at the beginning is too sentimental for such an unsentimental film but later improves itself greatly with the music. I thought the first scene of the accidental death was not documented enough and it leaves you pretty confused. Some of the characters' problems go in and out of the movie and I just wished there was more insight. A few of Ramsay's techniques got a little tiresome.Ahhhhhhhh. Great Imagery. I am such a sucker for good cinematography. There are three beautifully poetic scenes in the film you will not forget(the pasture, the trip to the moon, and the wonderfully ambiguous end that reminded me of My Own Private Idaho)The film gets good performances all around. The protagonist James is interesting but very mysterious because Ramsay keeps most of her characters at a distance. The protagonist's father is also a standout. It never let me get bored and was interesting. There are some very well done scenes involving the protagonist's father. In the latter part of the film, the score is used very effectively.