Of mice and kids

>> Ratcatcher paints a brutal portrait of childhood

by MARK SLUTSKY

It takes a sure hand for a director to capture childhood with any kind of insight. Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay's debut feature, Ratcatcher, avoids the usual pitfalls of precociousness to create an occasionally horrific, dreamlike film. Like a less psychotic Butcher Boy, Ratcatcher portrays a bleak, often violent world through the eyes of a child too innocent to fully understand it.

Set in '70s Glasgow during a garbage strike, Ratcatcher follows a young lad (played by newcomer William Eadie) on his wanderings in and around the decrepit housing estate his family lives in as they await newer, cleaner digs. It's a dark and dirty place, with bursting black garbage bags piled in mounds and a muddy, treacherous canal winding its way between the buildings. It's in this canal that Eadie accidentally drowns his friend (Thomas McTaggart) while playfully scrapping with him. No one, apparently, is witness to the tragedy and Eadie spends the rest of the film submerged in silent guilt.

Eadie's meanderings comprise the bulk of Ratcatcher. Ramsay creates a perfectly believable childhood environment: geographically small, but full of details only a child would notice--the rodentia living among the garbage heaps, the complex, often baffling relationships between the society of neighbourhood kids. One of the most interesting aspects of Ratcatcher is the relationship that develops between Eadie and a slightly older girl (Leanne Mullen). She's a plain girl who the housing estate's junior thugs use for sex; the abuse is displayed unflinchingly and her and Eadie's more innocent relationship is touching, and handled subtly.

Ramsay adds a surrealistic detail here and there to point up the film's juvenile perspective, as when a sadly disturbed kid attaches his new pet mouse to a balloon and lets it float away: we see the mouse float to the moon, which is populated by similar animals. These unreal moments are never distracting, but rather enhance the film's impact.

For a first feature, Ratcatcher has an impressive grasp of the complexities of the form--a Psycho-like perspective shift in the first few minutes of the movie is particularly effective and understated. Be warned, though: Ratcatcher is no walk in the park. It comes close, at times, to grotesquerie and many scenes are hard to watch. But it's a smart, inspired film, well worth the minor psychic toll.

Ratcatcher opens Friday, Oct. 27