A Community in Limbo
Ratcatcher is Lynne Ramsay's first film, set in Glasgow in the 1970s, during a real refuse workers' strike that left rubbish piled in the streets. With a narrow set of characters, a limited number of locations, and a spread-out, loosely threaded storyline, Ramsay forces us to focus on the feelings. Not just the ones experienced by her characters — the ones the film generates in us, sitting there watching. And what a broad spectrum that turns out to be.
Guilt. Loneliness. Despair. Grief. Curiosity. Boredom. Anger. Vanity. Selfishness. Hope. Naivety. Joy. Malice. Suffering. Evil. Hopelessness. Depression. Sadness. That is the range Ramsay works with here, and she moves through it without ever raising her voice. There is no score pushing you toward the correct response, no scene engineered to tell you exactly what to feel. She just puts you in the room with these people and lets the feeling arrive on its own terms.
Guilt. Loneliness. Despair. Grief. Curiosity. Boredom. Anger. Vanity. Selfishness. Hope. Naivety. Joy. Malice. Suffering. Evil. Hopelessness. Depression. Sadness.
What we see in Ratcatcher is a limbo. A community of people infinitely waiting for something, stuck in a temporality of unknown length — and who, despite that, refuse to act on any kind of positive change in their own lives. The waiting itself becomes the way of life. Everyone here is holding out for one specific event: the letter, the call, the day they finally get handed the keys to a new home. And they have convinced themselves that with that change will come not just a shiny piece of metal opening a door, but an entirely new life. One deprived of all the suffering, the pain, the dirt. A life in which they finally spread their wings and grasp every opportunity in front of them. In other words — happiness, arriving all at once, on the other side of a door they haven't been given yet.
Ramsay never tells you outright that this bargain is a fantasy. She just keeps showing you people behaving as though the waiting itself doesn't count — as though nothing that happens before the keys arrive is quite real, and so nothing before the keys arrive is quite their responsibility either. It is a devastating piece of psychology to build a whole film around, and she does it with almost no exposition at all.
Oh, and there is a fantastic scene of Kenny's flying mouse — a genuine no-miss.
It is worth saying, amid all that grief and stuck-ness, that the film also has moments of real lightness — and Kenny's mouse, sent up on a balloon toward the moon, is the best of them. A small, strange, weightless act of hope dropped into a film otherwise made of mud and waiting. It doesn't undercut everything else. If anything, it makes the rest land harder, because for one moment you remember what these characters are actually capable of wanting, before the limbo closes back over them.