Morvern Callar (2002)

Samantha Morton is the eponymous, bored, supermarket check out girl whose boyfriend commits suicide. She hides his body, takes his money - and a book that he had recently completed and along with her best friend, sets off on some travels. Initially around a wet and windy Scotland before heading to Spain for some fun. My issue with this rather dreary introspective is that neither she, nor her pal interested me in the slightest. Morton's performance is actually quite good; and her life of drugs, sex and lack of fulfilment may well have been the depiction of a labour of love from director Lynne Ramsey and co-author Liana Dognini, but as a piece of engaging cinema it fails completely. I don't doubt that there are many people for whom this is a manifestation of their psychological difficulties - an inability to form any kind of meaningful relationship - on any level - with anyone else; but it is presented in such a drab, pedestrian fashion that even some grand cinematography of the Balearic scenery does little to lift it from the doldrums.

This isn't a movie about some girl who needs to be in a relationship, or who just wants to party. This is a movie about grief. Trust me when I say that no two people in this world of eight billion will handle grief in exactly the same way. Even in one's lifetime, a single person can handle grief in many different ways, depending on the loss, the circumstances, where they are in their life when it happens.

What Lynne Ramsay offers here is an absolutely brilliant portrait of one person's grief. Morvern wakes on Christmas morning to find her boyfriend has committed suicide, leaving behind a completed novel and instructions for its publication. What she does next - claiming the manuscript as her own, taking his money, disappearing to Spain with her friend - will strike some viewers as callous or opportunistic. But that reading misses everything Ramsay is doing. This is suicide loss, and Morvern is trying to survive it in the only ways she knows how, and without outside help.

Everything in this film works in service of that grief. Ramsay's choice of shots, from the opening overhead view of Morvern lying next to her boyfriend's body to the vast ocean, the crowded village, the confusing mountains, all locate Morvern in spaces that mirror her internal state: trapped, overwhelmed, lost, searching for something she can't name. The amazing eclectic soundtrack moves between abrasive noise and unexpected beauty, reflecting how grief distorts everything, makes the familiar strange. Lucia Zucchetti's editing has a sense of timing that understands when to linger and when to cut, when silence is unbearable and when it's the only bearable thing.

Samantha Morton is brilliant as someone experiencing suicide loss. Watching her move through all her personal emotions and thoughts was magnetic; I couldn't take my eyes off her. Each stage, from her trying to internalize and accept the truth, to denial through attempted partying, seeking noise and then seeking silence, each attempt was so visible in her acting and demeanor. She doesn't cry on cue or deliver monologues about how she feels. She just is, moving through the days, trying on different versions of coping like ill-fitting clothes, none of them quite working. It's as though she has been through this process herself, or understood it so deeply that the performance bypasses acting and becomes embodiment.

The film is a masterclass in grief. It doesn't tell you how you're supposed to grieve or judge Morvern for grieving "wrong." It simply watches, with enormous compassion and formal rigor, as one person tries to figure out how to keep living when someone she loved chose not to. That's brave filmmaking. That's brave acting. It's why Morvern Callar endures as one of the most honest depictions of processing loss in contemporary cinema. It cements Lynne Ramsay as one of the finest creators of contemporary film.