Grief takes many forms. Even more so when the death of a loved one is by their own hand. Lynne Ramsay’s sophomore feature, Morvern Callar (2002), combines this specific form of grief with the aimlessness, compulsion and precarity of working-class youth to create a vivid and gripping portrait of a young woman coming untethered by the self-destructive actions of the man she loves.
Living in a small Scottish town, English woman Morvern (Samantha Morton) finds her boyfriend dead in a pool of blood in their apartment on Christmas morning. The festive blinking Christmas lights contrast with the grisly scene on the floor as the repetitive electronic buzz they make provides a white noise both antiseptic and grim. He’s left her a note, wrapped Christmas presents, a mixtape and an unfinished novel with instructions of where he’d like it sent. He even leaves funds for his own funeral.
What comes next is a young woman acting on impulse, but Ramsay’s script—which she adapted from Alan Warner’s 1995 experimental novel of the same name—and Morton’s riveting performance provide us with few clues as to what’s really going on inside Morvern’s head. That opacity is the film’s greatest strength, demanding that we scrutinize each ambiguous or unexpected action the protagonist makes, and Ramsay would employ similarly externally impenetrable yet internally anguished characters in her next two projects, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) and You Were Never Really Here (2017).
Morvern decides to not tell anyone about her boyfriend’s death. To her best friend, Lanna (Kathleen McDermott), she claims that he simply left her and moved to another country. Back at home, she leaves his corpse to lie for days in the doorway where he bled out, and in the meantime replaces his name with her own on the manuscript he’s left behind before sending it off to his dream publisher. After she eventually disposes of the body, she uses burial money he’s left and his ATM card to fund a trip to Spain for her and Lanna, where the two have misadventures and interpersonal clashes, particularly when Lanna guiltily confesses to having slept with Morvern’s boyfriend.
In this way, the film is as much about the relationship between these two women as it is about Morvern and her boyfriend. The bulk of the drama occurs between them. And yet, the specter of her boyfriend’s suicide looms, even after she dismembers his body, buries him in the wilderness and unloads a can of air freshener in their apartment. Morvern uses Lanna as a distraction and a companion on a compulsive holiday in which she seeks to purge her memory of her boyfriend. But what’s most fascinating is that she doesn’t seem haunted or tortured throughout much of the film, leaving the viewer to wonder how the cogs are turning in her head, the exception perhaps being the sobbing catharsis and giddy carnality she finds in a one-night stand with a guy who’s just lost his mother.
The film boasts a killer soundtrack, often played as diegetic sound from Morvern’s mixtape, which includes the likes of Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Can and Ween. But sometimes its insistence on style gets in the film’s way, as in the heavy-handed scene of Morvern dismembering her boyfriend’s corpse with a hacksaw in a bathtub while she wears little more than a pair of aviators. Set to the twee Velvet Underground tune “I’m Sticking with You,” the contrast with the macabre task at hand comes off as heavy-handed. Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra’s “Some Velvet Morning” set to Morvern simply walking into work at the supermarket similarly feels forced. The film also leans too heavily on its protagonist’s unusual name, having hotel staff and others mispronounce it and having her repeat it and even spell it out over the phone.
Despite its handful of contrivances, Ramsay’s film captures the elation and despair of a rudderless mindset forced upon a person by actions outside of their control. As Morvern takes in new sights and sounds, watching Spaniards wrangle a bull at a street festival or even finding wonder in walking lost along a dusty road in the middle of nowhere, the film offers poignant impressions of someone coping with death by trying to feel life. As she’s offered a huge advance on the novel she sent out under her own name, it feels like recompense more than fraudulence. The film may play fast and loose with trauma, occasionally striving to be too hip for its own good, but it’s a compelling portrait of one young woman’s attempt to find catharsis in the face of grief.
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