Morvern Callar (2002)
Directed by Lynne Ramsay
After her boyfriend commits suicide, a young woman attempts to use the unpublished manuscript of a novel and a sum of money he left behind to reinvent her life.
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What critics compared Morvern Callar to
The second half of the movie tumbles with Maud down a spiral of female solitude and hallucinatory madness that invokes cinematic precedents as varied as Ingmar Bergman’s Persona , Roman Polanski’s Repulsion , and Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar .
In its most piercing earthbound moments, “Saint Maud” even evokes the impressionistic human poetry of another shattered-woman study, Lynne Ramsay’s “Morvern Callar,” and not just because Clark has some of the young Samantha Morton’s moony, haunted ingenuousness.
It’s a performance that shares DNA with Samantha Morton in Morvern Callar and Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion : bold, uncompromising and vivid.
Moreover, she projects an unquenchable sensuality that evokes young Samantha Morton in films like Carine Adler’s Under the Skin (1997) and Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar, movies in which young women, pumped up full of emotion and hormones, also have a great time making bad choices.
As it is, Ms. Wells owes an incredible debt of gratitude to Lynne Ramsay’s vastly superior “Morvern Callar,” another Scottish movie about a young woman, haunted by her memories of an emotionally mysterious man, on an ill-advised cheap beach vacation.
I'm a huge fan of director Lynne Ramsay and have been eagerly waiting almost a decade for her follow up to her first two amazing, unique films: Ratcatcher (1999) and Morvern Callar (2002).
Early on in the fractured chronology of “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” director/co-writer Lynne Ramsay’s first film since 2002’s “Morvern Callar,” Eva arrives at Kevin’s school to see flashing police lights and screaming kids and their parents.
Ramsay’s a Scottish-born director who made two striking films a decade ago, 1999’s “Ratcatcher’’ and 2002’s “Morvern Callar.’’
The long overdue third feature from Scottish director and festival-validated auteur Lynne Ramsey (her second, "Morvern Callar," was released in 2002), "We Need to Talk About Kevin" resists easy interpretation, starting with its title: We assume the imperative is directed from wife (Swinton) to husband (John C. Reilly), when in fact it represents the voice of Ramsey, addressing all of us.
Ramsay (Morvern Callar) shatters the linear nature of her narrative to mirror the all-consuming grief and confusion of Swinton's Eva, a fortysomething mother who, it is implied, came to motherhood somewhat reluctantly after a youth spent writing for travel magazines and hopping around the globe in that pursuit.
Scottish writer/director Lynne Ramsey has been acclaimed for her desolate, visually stylized, European-art house sensibility, as demonstrated in “Ratcatcher” and “Morvern Callar,” as she makes repeated use of the color red, not only in the opening tomato-throwing festival sequence in Spain but also in the paint that neighborhood vandals throw on Eva’s house and the soup cans Eva hides behind in the grocery store.
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There’s even a touch of Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar to Laura’s story, as Glazer asks the audience to look through the eyes of a mostly silent misfit, muddling her way through Scotland.
He's a war veteran, though that cannot possibly be enough to explain the fathomless hell inside him (any more than we can ever really know what's going on in the head of the title character of Ramsay's 2002 Morvern Callar, her masterpiece, and a film to which You Were Never Really Here plays as kind of a dark mirror, exploring brute masculinity instead of quicksilver femininity).
You Were Never Really Here is a fourth feature from Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin) and the first thing to say is that it is exceptionally violent.
As she has in her previous films, “Ratcatcher” (1999), “Morvern Callar” (2002), and “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (2011) — the only one where the approach felt arch and overdone — Ramsay uses pop songs new and old along with broodingly lyrical original music to bring us further into a dangerous enchanted land.
With this impressionistic and often daringly enigmatic thriller taken from a short novel by Jonathan Ames, Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar) is back with a vengeance.
Joe is the agonized center of "You Were Never Really Here," directed by Lynne Ramsay ("Ratcatcher," " Morvern Callar ," "We Need To Talk About Kevin").
In the majestically economical yet brutally poetic life-grasping death trip “You Were Never Really Here,” the fourth feature by Lynne Ramsay (“Ratcatcher,” “Morvern Callar”), a masterpiece that some reviewers have tried to set ablaze and burn to the ground in their own words, the Scottish filmmaker finds a pulse that is not radial, carotid or femoral, but figuratively cranial.
Stories in which people pass others’ work as their own tend to be darker, whether dramatic a la Morvern Callar or as black comedy like in World’s Greatest Dad .
…doesn’t always work, certainly not with the same heft of Morvern Callar or You Were Never Really Here…
Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar, You Were Never Really Here) directs…
…all of her features going back to her 2002 sophomore film and reigning masterpiece Morvern Callar have been constructed around characters we're invited to observe but not invited to understand…
Part of a lineage of Ramsay leads who refuse to ingratiate themselves – see also: Samantha Morton in Morvern Callar, Tilda Swinton in We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lawrence goes to some pretty dark places in her full-bodied rejection of domestic expectations.