To kick off our Spring/Summer programme for 2025, Capitol Cinema Film Club brings you this legendary debut from iconic Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay — the rarely screened RATCATCHER!
With only four features to her name (and a fifth, the Jennifer Lawrence/Robert Pattinson-starring DIE MY LOVE arriving later this year), Lynne Ramsay has staked a claim as one of the most important filmmakers of her time. Through her daring images and transgressive storytelling, Ramsay’s eye on the world is quite different from any other. Her debut, RATCATCHER, is one of the most celebrated films of the nineties, an astonishing debut that revealed a filmmaker already working at full empathetic force, and at the time not even 30 years old. The story of a young boy named James living in the economically depressed Glasgow of the 1970s, Ramsay captures in vivid detail the desperation and hardship (and occasionally, transcendence) of this working class existence, even as James’ live spirals in directions out of his control.
The rarity of new Ramsay films has allowed for a great deal of mythology to amass around the works of hers that we do have — famously, RATCATCHER’s devastating opening sequence can be tied to the opening of DON’T LOOK NOW, which Ramsay reportedly watched when she was six years old. Ramsay’s remarkable images — James taking in a golden wheat field that borders a housing estate, or getting twisted in a curtain in the film’s famous opening — pay homage to British realism and yet feel distinctly their own. The themes that Ramsay would explore in future films - questions of identity, grief, and the lingering effects of trauma, were already present at this early stage in her career, in a film that would go on to influence a generation of young filmmakers.
Said critic Jamie Rebanal: ‘Lynne Ramsay’s directorial debut film is an unflinching portrait of life in Scotland, perhaps best described as a film that doesn’t ever hold back in its gritty portrait of childhood in Glasgow…Over the years, Ramsay has shown herself to be one among the most distinctive voices behind the camera in recent memory but all of that had to start somewhere, and when talking about Ratcatcher, it also gives oneself an idea of what more was to come in the future. This isn’t any ordinary coming-of-age film, it’s a film all about the economy of the time period and it’s made even more haunting by the very means in which Ramsay captures the misery and suffering that made life as she recognized it the way in which it is. Driving upon the styles that were set forward by the kitchen sink dramas of the 1960’s, yet also with a dash of surrealism, Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher is a film all about a generation defined by its own messiness.’
Don’t miss your chance to catch this rarely screened debut! RATCATCHER screens on August 27, 8pm — tickets just $13!
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