Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Fresh and Exciting

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

When I last visited Glasgow I thought the city was a lot more vibrant, respectable even glamorous than the griminess depicted in Ratcatcher.Lynne Ramsay's film is set in 1973 Glasgow where rubbish is being piled up because of the dustbin men strike. There is sordidness in the council tenements, rats, lice, dirty canals, drunken men and feral kids.Twelve year old James (William Eadie) yearns for a world out of this neighbourhood. In fact a bus ride to the edge of a city among fields shows him what is possible, maybe for the first time in the middle of nowhere where a new estate is being constructed he has left the city behind him.James might be no saint himself. His school friend drowned while he was playing with him in the canal. Some of the older kids he hangs around with are bullies, they treat a teenage girl as a plaything. At least James finds some tenderness with her.This is a grim but haunting and poetic film. The story is not told in a straightforward narrative. Ramsay has an eye for visuals which suggests an inspiration from Terrence Malick. A sequence of a mouse going to space tied to a balloon uses music from Badlands. The film also has influences from Ken Loach's Kes and Truffaut's 400 Blows.

A little boy hides a awful secret, and also enjoys catching mice. This is a dark, and yet beautifully shot, and extremely well written picture. Scenes like the discovery of the wheat field are truly enchanting. Only downside is that the film is Scottish, and the accents are so thick that understanding what any of the characters are saying is a nearly impossible challenge.

Ratcatcher utterly surprised me. Not because of the talking, which I hardly understood at all (I'm Austrian), but because of the surprising scarcity of dialogues. I doubt that there was a single situation where any of the protagonists talked for more than five seconds in a row. That's why the movie wasn't that difficult to grasp, as most of the plot was primarily carried by images and stunning shots of William Eadie's character. I guess that there were minutes where no-one actually said a word for a long time - which makes this movie maybe the movie with the least words spoken I've ever seen. Concerning its plot - it's very much reminiscent of Kes. You get a first-hand insight into the bleak and dull existence those kids in Glasgow have to endure. James is suffering from thorough disillusion. The sequences when you actually see him smile - which are two or three maybe - are thus real highlights of the movie. He is the one who bears the emotional burden of the movie. I particularly liked the scene when he was lying on the sofa and his young sister places herself next to him. The other highlight was when he took the bus and found this solitary house and the grain field, where he experienced some kind of relief from his tough life. The ending was ambiguous. I suppose he actually did drown himself - and the last image show his dreams of his family moving away from their bleak existence towards a brighter future - a future he thinks is only possible without him. Just think of the young girl holding the Miro towards the sky - and then you see James' face. And you see him drown again right when the credits start.

i saw this film last night on criterion and couldn't help but notice it's curious similarities with David Gordon green's highly inventive but slightly over-rated "george Washington". Terrence Alick has indeed casted a very long shadow on today's young film-makers. the key for them is to, like Terrence Malick, devoid their films of intellectual and emotional pornography. similar to works of Terrence Alick and other 70's filmmakers in general, this film is just another one of the films that are adding on resurgence of 70's type personal cinema (and my favorite type at that, the slow and lyrical films devoid of over-bearing plot). i think Lynne Ramsay has been in some ways been unfairly overlooked by critics. but she is going to go far, you can just tell with some people. for those who liked this might wanna check out: anything by Terrence Malick, David Gordon green, Kim Ki-duk, Errol morris, Hans Petter Moland, "the return" by Andrei Zvyagintsev and classic McCabe and Mrs. miller.i'm sure i'm missing a lot of names but these film explore in someways similar narrative style.