Ratcatcher

Lynne Ramsay's debut feature, Ratcatcher (1999), premiered at Cannes and announced one of the most distinctive visual stylists in British cinema. Set in the Glasgow of the director's own childhood during a refuse strike, it transformed kitchen-sink material into something closer to poetry, and remains a touchstone of British independent film.

William Eadie plays James, the withdrawn boy haunted by a death he feels responsible for, in a film that privileges image, texture and mood over plot. Ramsay, who trained as a photographer, fills the screen with arresting compositions — a louse crawling across a scalp, a mouse carried to the moon on a balloon, fields of long grass glimpsed beyond the tenements — finding beauty and strangeness amid deprivation. The result is impressionistic and elliptical, attentive to the inner life of a child the world overlooks.

Critics hailed it as a remarkable first film, and Ramsay went on to We Need to Talk About Kevin and You Were Never Really Here. Lyrical, melancholy and visually ravishing, Ratcatcher refuses the documentary plainness usually applied to such subjects, insisting instead on the poetic interiority of poverty. It stands as one of the great British debuts and a foundational work of contemporary art-house cinema. Ramsay went on to We Need to Talk About Kevin and You Were Never Really Here, but this debut already showed the painterly, interior sensibility that would make her one of British cinema's most distinctive stylists.