Glasgow, 1973. The film starts with a young boy—James's friend Ryan Quinn—twirling himself in mesh curtains before his mother clouts him and readies him to visit his father. But Ryan chooses to play with James instead, and runs off with his mother unawares. Ryan meets James at the canal and drowns during some rough horseplay, at which point James runs away. No one apparently saw that James had tussled with Ryan before his death, but his sense of guilt lingers. Ryan's family are re-housed. On leaving day, Ryan's mother gives James the pair of brown sandals she'd bought for her son on the day of his death, which James purposefully scratches with a piece of broken glass.
Sensitive James tries to make sense of the insensitive aspects of his environment as the film proceeds in an episodic structure. He encounters the local gang bullying a girl, Margaret Anne, as they throw her glasses into the canal, but he does nothing. James falls in with the gang at one point—though they threaten to throw him into the canal to drown him like Ryan—and joins them when they visit Margaret Anne, where they each penetrate her sexually. When James is offered a turn, he lays fully clothed on Margaret Anne as she strokes his head tenderly.
One day he takes a bus to the end of its route on the outskirts of Glasgow. He explores a new housing estate under construction. Standing in front of a kitchen window in a half-built house, he wonders in awe at the view: an expansive field of wheat, blowing in the wind and reaching to the horizon. James climbs through the window and escapes into the blissful freedom of the field.
One of James' friends, a simple boy named Kenny, receives a pet mouse as a birthday present. After the gang throw the mouse around in the air to make him "fly," Kenny asks James where he would fly to. James, trying to prevent the gang from throwing it at the wall, says the moon. Kenny then ties the mouse's tail to a balloon and releases it as James and the gang watch. In a fantastical shift, the film shows it floating to the moon. Then, Kenny's mouse joins a whole colony of other mice frolicking on the moon.
James and Margaret Anne become friends and find comfort in each other's company. After his mother delouses James and his sister, he uses the materials to delouse Margaret Anne at her flat. They bathe together during the process, playing with the soap together in a child-like way.
Kenny later falls in the canal trying to catch a perch and is rescued by James' father, who briefly becomes a local hero and is given a medal for bravery. While his father is in a deep sleep following the rescue, James lets in the council inspectors tasked with assessing merit for rehousing. In his disheveled state, his father makes a poor impression on the inspectors. He berates James for the mistake and says that their likely rejection would be James's fault.
After receiving the medal, his father goes out drinking with friends. He also buys a pair of cleats for James, presumably to mend their relationship. The local gang falls upon James's father while he's playing with a stray cat on the way home and slashes him with a switchblade. When he comes home, drunk and injured, he forcefully offers the cleats to James, who rejects them.
When James's mother tries to tend to his father's injuries, he slaps her as the family look on. After, James throws the cleat at him and runs away. He visits Margaret Anne's home and the two embrace in bed. She asks him if he loves her and he says that he does.
The Army eventually arrive to clean all the rubbish from the neighbourhood. After failing to recover Margaret Anne's glasses from the canal, James sees her once again with the local gang taking turns sexually abusing her. James snaps at Kenny, saying that he killed his own mouse. Kenny then starts chanting "poor cow" about Margaret Anne, drawing James's anger. He continues, chanting that he saw James kill Ryan Quinn.
After a tender moment with his little sister, James rises early and goes to the canal, where he sinks below the surface. A brief scene is shown of James and his family moving into the new neighbourhood, carrying their furniture and possessions across the wheat field that James discovered earlier. James walks behind the main group and slowly faces the camera, his face breaking into a full smile.
The closing credits play, showing James sinking in slow motion in the murky canal water, with his fate left up to interpretation.
Director Lynne Ramsay began developing Ratcatcher after two previous short films—Small Deaths (1995) and Gasman (1997)—each received the Short Film Palme D'Or jury prize. A third short film, Kill the Day, received the jury prize at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in 1996.[6] After seeing these shorts, BBC Scotland development producer Ruth McCance requested a treatment on the film, which Ramsay said was unusually long at around 50 pages.[7] The film was eventually produced by BBC Scotland and Pathé. [7]
For Ratcatcher, Ramsay retained the same cinematographer (Alwin H. Küchler), editor (Lucia Zucchetti) and production designer (Jane Morton), as well as producer Gavin Emerson, from her three successful short films.[6][8]
The film is set in Glasgow during a binmen's strike, featuring streets strewn with garbage bags and refuse, like New York City (pictured) during its own 1968 garbage strike.
Ramsay sought non-actors for the roles—she cast her niece Lynne Ramsay Jr. as the protagonist's little sister and her brother James in a small role as a bereaved father—citing their authentically imperfect faces and ability to act genuinely.[8][9] Ramsay also did not explain any of the broader script progression to the child actors, feeling that too much detail would become distracting and detract from their spontaneity.[8] The opening scene, featuring Ryan Quinn enmeshed in curtains, was the first scene Ramsay wrote for the movie.[10]
Ratcatcher was shot in the Govan neighborhood of Glasgow, which was intended to reflect the "ugly beautiful" contrasts of life there.[6] Though Ramsay grew up in Glasgow during the film's time period, she did not imagine it as autobiographical.[9] Ramsay described vague memory of the binmen's strikes, but mainly chose that specific setting as a way to demonstrate the grime of poverty and the potential for a boy's grim imagination to persist.[8] While Ramsay's experience sits at a remove from the events of the story, she affirmed the film's Glaswegian roots, saying that "if [she] had grown up in Sussex, she'd have probably made a very different film."[9]The production team also incorporated out-of-time aspects of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, to prevent the film from being overrun with "kitsch nostalgia of the 1970s."[8]
The decision to center the story around a young male lead came from Ramsay's interest in the phenomena of pack mentality and emotional desensitization, which she felt were better reflected in a pre-teen boy.[8]
When the movie was released, director Lynne Ramsay defended the nude bathing scene between the characters of James and Margaret Anne from accusations by Scottish tabloids that the film contained underage sex.
"That scene's very innocent, actually. Maybe there's an element that's latently sexual, really it's two kids having a laugh in the bath. When you're a kid, you do things that are pretty risqué - the kind of things that no one will admit to their mothers and fathers but we all did. I was very lucky to get that scene - but it was the toughest I've ever shot."[11]
Critics praised Lynne Ramsay (pictured in 2018) for her directorial talent in Ratcatcher, her debut feature.
Ratcatcher received highly positive reviews from critics. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gave it a score of 85 percent on the Tomatometer, based on 47 critic ratings.[12] The site's critical consensus is that "critics find Ratcatcher to be hauntingly beautiful, though its story is somewhat hard to stomach."[12]Metacritic, which assigns a rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, has a "generally favorable" score of 72 based on 22 reviews.[13]
The film premiered at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival and it contended for the Un Certain Regard award. Jonathan Romney wrote at the time for The Guardian that the film revealed Ramsay as a "fully fledged visionary" on her debut.[14] For Variety, European correspondent David Rooney hailed its impressionistic and "quasi-magical quality."[15]
Upon its wider release in the United Kingdom in November 1999, other critics praised the film. Peter Bradshaw wrote that the film was "a shimmering, transcendental poem, hyper-real in its heightened perception of light, shape and proportion, and invested with such sweetness and humour, disclosing a gentle humanity amid the impacts and abrasions of the inner-city existence it portrays."[16]
Ratcatcher received its American debut at the New Directors/New Films Festival in April 2000, where The New York Times named it a critic's pick.[17]Elvis Mitchell wrote that the film "provides an intimacy that is completely mesmerizing. Rarely has physical wretchedness been rendered with such delicacy."[17] For the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan ranked it as his favorite release of 2000, citing Ramsay's essential talent for film-making and the hope that Ratcatcher's American release—as a small international art film with heavily accented English dialogue—gave him for the future of film releases.[18]
Despite its generally positive reception, some reviewers felt the film to have its flaws. San Francisco Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle praised Ramsay's shot selection and William Eadie's lead performance, but struggled with the strong Glaswegian accents and overall felt Ratcatcher was "better contemplated than experienced."[19]New York Post critic Lou Lumenick likewise has written that Ratcatcher was a "misery wallow" and that Ramsay often made use of "unappealing British miserabilism."[20][21]
A 2019 BBC Culture survey of international film critics and experts ranked Ratcatcher the 66th best film directed by a woman.[22] American director Barry Jenkins has called it one of his favorite films and formative to his own work.[23][24] In a 2025 interview British actor Gary Oldman named Ratcatcher as his favorite UK movie.[25]
Film theorist Stella Hockenhull has credited Ratcatcher with being one of the first films by female directors to depict "realism through rich visual imagery rather than symbolic socio-political concerns," a technique later echoed by The Selfish Giant and Fish Tank.[30]
123456Ramsay, Lynne (1999). "Childhood is a Blank Canvas: An Interview with Lynne Ramsay by Lizzie Francke". Ratcatcher (Interview). Interviewed by Lizzie Francke. Faber & Faber. pp.vi–xiv.
↑Lumenick, Lou (9 December 2011). "Little of substance behind all the bleak 'Talk'". New York Post. Retrieved 17 January 2026. Scottish director Ramsay (responsible for such critically praised misery wallows as "Ratcatcher and "Morvern Callar) is not exactly shy about heaping blame on Eve.
↑Lumenick, Lou (19 July 2013). "Eloise Laurence steals the show in 'Broken' | New York Post". New York Post. Retrieved 17 January 2026. The teacher is also falsely accused of rape by the same girl — and Skunk's story is subsumed as the increasingly violent 'Broken' embraces the sort of unappealing British miserabilism perfected by "Ratcatcher" director Lynne Ramsay.
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