Morvern Callar
Samantha Morton gives a magnetic star performance in Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s prizewinning second feature, a playful suspense drama based on Alan Warner’s cult novel. Morton plays the eponymous antiheroine, a frustrated young woman who steals her dead boyfriend’s unpublished novel, calmly passing it off as her own work as she embarks on a hedonistic road trip to Spain with best friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott). With its time-scrambled, loopy rhythms and cleverly integrated mixtape soundtrack, MORVERN CALLAR is a highly original work of uncompromising beauty. Coming after RATCATCHER (1999), it confirmed Ramsay as a major new cinematic voice.
Samantha Morton, Kathleen McDermott, Linda McGuire
- Notes From Kim GordonI love the way Lynne Ramsay uses sound dynamics. In this movie the music is like another character. The mixtape that her dead boyfriend made and left for her (saying, “Keep the music for yourself”) becomes a thread throughout the film. He is the music—it not only keeps him alive for her but replaces him.
- Notes From Rachel KushnerThe novel on which Ramsay’s gritty and sublime mood portrait is based happens to be one of my all-time favorite works of literature (the novel of the same name by Alan Warner), but what makes it so great as literature is its unfilmable interiority, Morvern’s incantatory thoughts. And yet Lynne Ramsay, who must love this book as much as I do, understood how to build something—a world that is equal to, if necessarily different from, the effect of the book.
