リン・ラムゼイの野生で逃亡者の映画のガイド

Although she has only directed five feature films in a quarter-century career, Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s influence can be felt throughout British cinema today – blending an immediate, sometimes painful naturalism with the impressionistic qualities of photography. Watching her social-realist drama Ratcatcher, set in an impoverished burgh in Glasgow during the 1973 refuse strikes, or Morvern Callar, about a woman fleeing her boyfriend’s suicide from Scotland to Spain, you can track the subjective expressions of style and theme that would take root in the imagination of British filmmakers, including recent success stories like Aftersun and Urchin.

But after her first two films, Ramsay struggled with an industry unforgiving to directors seeking creative control. She was attached to two films that were ultimately shot by other directors, The Lovely Bones and the troubled Jane Got a Gun, while many of her other announced projects languished in development hell. Do not pin your hopes on seeing her version of Stephen King’s The Girls Who Loved Tom Gordon or “Moby Dick in space”, and word on her two ominous Arctic-set films, Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress and the Joaquin Phoenix/Rooney Mara-starring Polaris, is frustratingly quiet.

This is partly why the release of Die My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson – two A-listers eager for the type of thorny, ugly and vulnerable material Ramsay specialises in – feels significant. The film, which charts a neglected mother’s gruelling descent into postpartum psychosis, unravels with a similar push-and-pull of sudden disorientation and confessional intimacy that has marked Ramsay’s previous features and shorts.

Here, AnOther charts each film in Lynne Ramsay’s filmography to give a complete picture of the hugely influential Scottish director.

Ramsay’s debut made waves when it was first released in 1999, ultimately winning her the Bafta for outstanding British debut. Her only feature not based on a novel, it laid the blueprint for Ramsay’s visual approach to narrative – scenes of immediate naturalism, charged with tension or tenderness, and clear, poetic imagery that conjures feelings of death, self-destruction and suffocation. Guilt courses through Ratcatcher, after 12-year-old James (William Eadie) accidentally drowns his friend in the filthy, shallow waters of a Glasgow canal. Death and destitution feel close, and so escape lingers on James’ mind, illustrated memorably by a visit to an incomplete housing development bordering a vast, pristine wheatfield, not to mention the surreal image of a pet mouse tied to a balloon, floating into space.

Ramsay’s follow-up to Ratcatcher was an adaptation of Scottish author Alan Warner’s existentialist novel about a young woman covering up her boyfriend’s death, pilfering his unpublished manuscript and holidaying in Spain. Like many of Ramsay’s films, Morvern Callar follows up a sudden change or trauma with a keen desire for escape, but feels significant as the one where so much of her distinct formal language takes shape – an overwhelming use of carefully selected music, extreme close-ups of objects that separate us from the normal size and shape of the world, and blank faces, as when the incredible Samantha Morton surveys a hectic nightclub. A strong case for the best film in Ramsay’s career, Morvern Callar is an expert study of self-realisation born out of recklessness and intimacy. 

An aggressive, fractured story about the ostracising crater created by tragedy, Ramsay’s third film adapts a novel about a mother reflecting on and recoiling from a high school massacre committed by her teenage son. When it was published in 2003, the novel tapped into the American zeitgeist, and in 2011, the country’s reckoning with homegrown violence sadly wasn’t going anywhere; Ramsay’s film is brimming with provocative and dread-inducing images that evoke the helplessness of a decade’s worth of subsequent school shootings. The director deploys a perfectly cast Tilda Swinton as Eva, who shares a cold, ugly rapport with Kevin (Jasper Newell and Ezra Miller, as his pre-teen and teen incarnations), who seems devoted to causing her misery. The domestic flashback scenes are excruciating, but the glimpses at Eva in an eternal, punishing limbo after Kevin’s crimes are where the film shines brightest.

Ramsay made three short films before 1999’s Ratcatcher, but Kill the Day, Small Deaths and Gasman don’t commit to the severe, abstract stylisation fuelling Swimmer. Commissioned by the organising committee of the 2012 London Olympics, Ramsay’s film was shot in black-and-white, following a lone, mute swimmer progressing through different British waterways, floating past people, music and film dialogue of unique national relevance. It’s a serene, absorbing watch, referencing British cultural touchstones like The Lord of the Flies, Walkabout and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner without pausing to explain their significance. These are works that take to task assumptions of national identity, and the constant movement of the Swimmer suggests such questioning is part of a fluid process of British culture.

In Ramsay’s spare and paranoid thriller, an army veteran acts as a clandestine avenger-for-hire for young missing girls. Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is waterlogged with trauma, pulsating with suicidal impulses, and devoted to his elderly mother (Judith Roberts) as a last connection to humane normalcy. But his latest job ensnares him in a conspiracy that eerily mirrors the obsessive narratives of QAnon and the Epstein Files. Ramsay’s first thriller sticks closely to the skeleton of a hitman mission-gone-wrong story, while mining archetypal images of the genre – here, the violent guardian wearily carrying a child on his back feels especially poignant and piercing. Ramsay’s subjective editing mimics the intrusive determination of traumatic memory, animating Joe’s sluggish march towards absolution with unflinching, erratic effectiveness.

Ramsay’s latest is her most aggressive story of a woman trying to escape a sudden, seismic disruption in her life; the film tells the story of Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), who devolves into animalistic frenzy and delirium after the birth of her child with an immature husband, Jackson (Robert Pattinson). Working from a screenplay she co-wrote with playwrights Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, Ramsay distorts the colours and textures of Montana’s open skies and thick treelines surrounding Grace, tempting her deeper into a detached, unreal world. Die My Love can be archly comedic thanks to Lawrence embracing her character’s most unpredictable and provocative impulses, and Sissy Spacek as Jackson’s intrusive mother and Nick Nolte as his dementia-suffering father feel particularly well-used, as Ramsay restresses her fascination with ailing parents seen through younger, searching eyes.

Although she has only directed five feature films in a quarter-century career, Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s influence can be felt throughout British cinema today – blending an immediate, sometimes painful naturalism with the impressionistic qualities of photography. Watching her social-realist drama Ratcatcher, set in an impoverished burgh in Glasgow during the 1973 refuse strikes, or Morvern Callar, about a woman fleeing her boyfriend’s suicide from Scotland to Spain, you can track the subjective expressions of style and theme that would take root in the imagination of British filmmakers, including recent success stories like Aftersun and Urchin.

But after her first two films, Ramsay struggled with an industry unforgiving to directors seeking creative control. She was attached to two films that were ultimately shot by other directors, The Lovely Bones and the troubled Jane Got a Gun, while many of her other announced projects languished in development hell. Do not pin your hopes on seeing her version of Stephen King’s The Girls Who Loved Tom Gordon or “Moby Dick in space”, and word on her two ominous Arctic-set films, Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress and the Joaquin Phoenix/Rooney Mara-starring Polaris, is frustratingly quiet.

This is partly why the release of Die My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson – two A-listers eager for the type of thorny, ugly and vulnerable material Ramsay specialises in – feels significant. The film, which charts a neglected mother’s gruelling descent into postpartum psychosis, unravels with a similar push-and-pull of sudden disorientation and confessional intimacy that has marked Ramsay’s previous features and shorts.

Here, AnOther charts each film in Lynne Ramsay’s filmography to give a complete picture of the hugely influential Scottish director.

Ramsay’s debut made waves when it was first released in 1999, ultimately winning her the Bafta for outstanding British debut. Her only feature not based on a novel, it laid the blueprint for Ramsay’s visual approach to narrative – scenes of immediate naturalism, charged with tension or tenderness, and clear, poetic imagery that conjures feelings of death, self-destruction and suffocation. Guilt courses through Ratcatcher, after 12-year-old James (William Eadie) accidentally drowns his friend in the filthy, shallow waters of a Glasgow canal. Death and destitution feel close, and so escape lingers on James’ mind, illustrated memorably by a visit to an incomplete housing development bordering a vast, pristine wheatfield, not to mention the surreal image of a pet mouse tied to a balloon, floating into space.

Ramsay’s follow-up to Ratcatcher was an adaptation of Scottish author Alan Warner’s existentialist novel about a young woman covering up her boyfriend’s death, pilfering his unpublished manuscript and holidaying in Spain. Like many of Ramsay’s films, Morvern Callar follows up a sudden change or trauma with a keen desire for escape, but feels significant as the one where so much of her distinct formal language takes shape – an overwhelming use of carefully selected music, extreme close-ups of objects that separate us from the normal size and shape of the world, and blank faces, as when the incredible Samantha Morton surveys a hectic nightclub. A strong case for the best film in Ramsay’s career, Morvern Callar is an expert study of self-realisation born out of recklessness and intimacy. 

An aggressive, fractured story about the ostracising crater created by tragedy, Ramsay’s third film adapts a novel about a mother reflecting on and recoiling from a high school massacre committed by her teenage son. When it was published in 2003, the novel tapped into the American zeitgeist, and in 2011, the country’s reckoning with homegrown violence sadly wasn’t going anywhere; Ramsay’s film is brimming with provocative and dread-inducing images that evoke the helplessness of a decade’s worth of subsequent school shootings. The director deploys a perfectly cast Tilda Swinton as Eva, who shares a cold, ugly rapport with Kevin (Jasper Newell and Ezra Miller, as his pre-teen and teen incarnations), who seems devoted to causing her misery. The domestic flashback scenes are excruciating, but the glimpses at Eva in an eternal, punishing limbo after Kevin’s crimes are where the film shines brightest.

Ramsay made three short films before 1999’s Ratcatcher, but Kill the Day, Small Deaths and Gasman don’t commit to the severe, abstract stylisation fuelling Swimmer. Commissioned by the organising committee of the 2012 London Olympics, Ramsay’s film was shot in black-and-white, following a lone, mute swimmer progressing through different British waterways, floating past people, music and film dialogue of unique national relevance. It’s a serene, absorbing watch, referencing British cultural touchstones like The Lord of the Flies, Walkabout and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner without pausing to explain their significance. These are works that take to task assumptions of national identity, and the constant movement of the Swimmer suggests such questioning is part of a fluid process of British culture.

In Ramsay’s spare and paranoid thriller, an army veteran acts as a clandestine avenger-for-hire for young missing girls. Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is waterlogged with trauma, pulsating with suicidal impulses, and devoted to his elderly mother (Judith Roberts) as a last connection to humane normalcy. But his latest job ensnares him in a conspiracy that eerily mirrors the obsessive narratives of QAnon and the Epstein Files. Ramsay’s first thriller sticks closely to the skeleton of a hitman mission-gone-wrong story, while mining archetypal images of the genre – here, the violent guardian wearily carrying a child on his back feels especially poignant and piercing. Ramsay’s subjective editing mimics the intrusive determination of traumatic memory, animating Joe’s sluggish march towards absolution with unflinching, erratic effectiveness.

Ramsay’s latest is her most aggressive story of a woman trying to escape a sudden, seismic disruption in her life; the film tells the story of Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), who devolves into animalistic frenzy and delirium after the birth of her child with an immature husband, Jackson (Robert Pattinson). Working from a screenplay she co-wrote with playwrights Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, Ramsay distorts the colours and textures of Montana’s open skies and thick treelines surrounding Grace, tempting her deeper into a detached, unreal world. Die My Love can be archly comedic thanks to Lawrence embracing her character’s most unpredictable and provocative impulses, and Sissy Spacek as Jackson’s intrusive mother and Nick Nolte as his dementia-suffering father feel particularly well-used, as Ramsay restresses her fascination with ailing parents seen through younger, searching eyes.