Ratcatcher

Lynne Ramsay's debut feature, Ratcatcher (1999), premiered at Cannes and introduced British cinema to a visual stylist unlike anyone else working in it. It is set in the Glasgow of the director's own childhood, during a refuse strike, and it takes kitchen-sink material somewhere close to poetry. British independent film still measures itself against it.

William Eadie plays James, a withdrawn boy haunted by a death he feels responsible for, in a film more interested in image, texture and mood than in plot. Ramsay trained as a photographer, and she 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. She finds beauty and strangeness in deprivation, and the film is impressionistic and elliptical, attentive to the inner life of a child the world overlooks.

Critics saw immediately that it was a remarkable first film, and Ramsay went on to We Need to Talk About Kevin and You Were Never Really Here. Ratcatcher is lyrical and melancholy, ravishing to look at, and it turns down the documentary plainness usually applied to such subjects in favour of the inner life of a poor child. It is one of the great British debuts and a foundation stone of contemporary art-house cinema. The painterly, interior sensibility that would carry We Need to Talk About Kevin and You Were Never Really Here is already fully formed in it.