Released 25 years ago, Ratcatcher featured two of the most striking debuts in British cinematic history. It’s rightly remembered as the first film by the writer-director Lynne Ramsay, the brilliant Glaswegian who went on to make Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin and You Were Never Really Here. And it was the acting debut of William Eadie, whose performance as James, a boy haunted by guilt and ground down by poverty, was vital to the success of an extraordinary work.
Set in a hideously run-down housing estate in Glasgow in 1973, it opens with a gorgeous slow-motion shot of another boy, Ryan, winding himself in his mother’s net curtains. Yet danger looms, as it does throughout the movie. Soon Ryan (Thomas McTaggart) will be dead, accidentally drowning in the local canal after a play fight with James. Those curtains, we realise, were meant to foreshadow a funeral shroud.
James is not accused, and never speaks of the incident, but his struggle to process it is marked on his face and in his silences. It’s an incredible, contained turn by Eadie, verbally inarticulate but full of depth in expression and gesture.
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You wince for James when he is asked to fetch something from Ryan’s flat by the dead boy’s grieving, unknowing mother. A dustmen’s strike has left the estate littered with rubbish bags and swarming with rats; other perils range from that hellish canal to a gang of older boys who casually abuse a pet mouse and a vulnerable local girl, Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen).
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Ken Loach is a clear influence, but the style here is more lyrical and hypnotic — witness the spectacular scene in which James gets a bus out of town and stumbles upon a golden wheatfield. Ramsay has become one of our most revered film-makers; Eadie, tragically, has barely acted since.
★★★★★
15, 93min
In selected cinemas
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