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 His withdrawn and cautious attempt of contact, along with the mixture of guilt and innocence is portrayed matchlessly.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.

Director Lynne Ramsey creates a very haunting drama taking place in Scotland's largest city, Glasgow. It is a hot summer and the trash men are on strike; the garbage bags littering sidewalk breeding grounds for rats. It is 1973, and young teen James(William Eadie)lives in a rundown flat with his Da(Tommy Flanagan), Ma(Mandy Matthews)and sisters eagerly waiting in anticipation of the housing council's permission to move to a newer flat. It is a very depressing time and James watches a friend drown in a fetid canal while play-fighting. His neighbor Kenny(John Miller), who loves gathering rats to put in his make believe circus, is angry blaming James for the death of their school mate. James will spend time and befriend a slightly-older Margaret Anne(Lynne Ramsey Jr.), who is constantly raped by neighborhood hooligans. This is a stark and depressing character driven drama. It is as if the stain of humanity will never fade away. James seems to catch most of his drunken da's anger, as if it is his fault the striking trash collectors are without a job. Two bright spots for the jug-eared lad is his dream of moving out of squaller and his budding love for Margaret Anne. Music by the likes of Eddy Cochrane, The Chordettes and Tom Jones move the story along. Other players: Michelle Stewart, Craig Boner, Mick Maharg and Andrew McKenna.

This film about growing up urban in Scotland is masterful in its depiction of life as an unstoppable downward spiral of degradation, social entropy and anomie ending in slime, criminality and despair. Every step of this short and brutal downfall is lovingly illustrated with scenes of filth, coarseness, profanity, idiocy, moral turpitude, ignorance, poverty, intoxication and vermin. It's quite a ride, even though it rather shamelessly borrows a Carl Orff theme that was already made famous by its use in Terrence Malick's "Badlands" for its score and reproduces Mike Leigh's naturalistic atmospheres without the humour and a single glimmer of hope. Should the viewer feel like cleansing his palate after this ordeal, may I recommend two films on the same subject, the poetry and terrors of childhood? They are just as rewarding but without the vomit-inducing sadism and body fluids. They are:(1) "The Steamroller and The Violin"/"Katok i skripka", 1960, URSS, a 42-minute student film by Andrei Tarkovsky, one of the loveliest films ever put together on planet Earth (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053987/), and(2) "The Children Are Watching Us"/"Bambini ci guardano", Vittorio DeSica's first collaboration with neo-realist screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, 1943, an almost forgotten classic, finally on Criterion DVD (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034493/).

This is a powerful movie about a boy who is relentlessly ground down by the oppressive circumstances of his life. Poverty, neglect and rejection are his personal environment, set within a larger picture of crumbling social structures and economic chaos. Other characters do reach out to him in various ways, including sexual, but their overtures, as mostly everyone's, are rooted in their own needs. The protagonist has learned from hard experience to be suspicious of the self-involved people around him, so he's unable to respond to any of these "half a loaf" offers. Even the fact that this is a movie IN English that requires English SUBTITLES contributes to the sense of alienation. This film is drama, not entertainment. Of course I can't tell you about the ending, but I will say that I had to rewind the tape and watch it again just to make sure I had really seen what I'd seen. I won't soon forget "Ratcatcher."