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While watching this fascinating coming-of-age drama set in urban Scotland during the mid-'70s, you can't help but flash on BILLY ELLIOT. But despite many shared parallels, RATCATCHER is much less a feel-good, you-go-boy movie, more an extremely sensitive, sometimes brutally realistic portrayal of a lad with a secret and how he ultimately comes to terms with it. It's a deeper, more emotionally complex film, blessed with a languid tempo and a plethora of symbolic images sure to inspire rumination for weeks to come.

Twelve-year-old James (William Eadie) is living in a Glasgow slum during a months-long garbage strike. The rats are the only ones faring well during this bleak summer, captured in a dark documentary style in which the camera lingers long on surfaces, expressions, symbols. James' Da (Tommy Flanagan) is an unemployed alcoholic whose only use for his son is to fetch beer; his Ma (Mandy Matthews) is the resigned Al-Anon who loves her family but is hamstrung by her hardscrabble existence. The kids play, vent their anger, and even eat lunch in the stinking rubbish heaps.

[plot spoiler] One day while James swims with his friend Ryan in the canal, they play too rough and the boy drowns. As James battles his guilt, we watch the trash bags pile up, the vermin proliferate, and the boy become keenly aligned with the bleakness of his surroundings. We witness all the usual cruelty of childhood-the taunts, bullying, put-downs-but seen through this guilt-wracked boy's eyes, they become almost as unbearable as his growing alienation from himself and his family. Accents are brick thick, but the film thoughtfully provides English subtitles so you can differentiate `p**s off' from `w**k off' from `fook off.'

But even in this wretched environment, small bits of love do surface, breaking ground like flowers through cement walkways. James meets the awkwardly flirtatious Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen), another sensitive soul, who seeks the local boys' approval by gang-banging them. The pair bond around their respective wounds, and while bubble-bathing with Margaret, James laughs for the only time during the film.

The boy also forms a tentative bond with innocent Kenny (John Miller), dubbed `the wee spastic b***ard' by the other kids because of his extreme love of animals, speech impediment, and some general squirliness that's hard to diagnose. He may be the village naif, but he ultimately discerns the truth of James' situation-and James the truth of his-and both confront each other in ways that allow them to accept reality. Kenny launches the film's most amazing image: a white mouse tied to a moon-bound helium balloon.

James becomes keenly aware of the squalor he lives in as he watches his `half-cut' father, drunk to drooling, slur `I love you' to Ma while Tom Jones rocks the Beeb. But his redemption dream comes in the guise of a new house that a city agency has promised the family. In several beautifully transcendent scenes, James rides the bus to the end of the line, where a spate of such new homes are under construction. He tumbles through the big open field before them, takes a whiz in a brand-new toilet, and absorbed in revelry, kicks a can all the way home.

Driven purely by images and emotional content, RATCATCHER is an auspicious debut by Glaswegian writer/director Lynne Ramsay, whose sensitive eye reminds us how truly excruciating childhood's tortures can be. It's a thoroughly outstanding production, from Rachel Portman's minimalist score to the wonderfully slow pacing to memorable performances by a cast of mostly newcomers.

Bravo.

This film about growing up urban in Scotland is masterful in its depiction of life as an unstoppable downward spiral of degradation, social entropy and anomie ending in slime, criminality and despair. Every step of this short and brutal downfall is lovingly illustrated with scenes of filth, coarseness, profanity, idiocy, moral turpitude, ignorance, poverty, intoxication and vermin. It's quite a ride, even though it rather shamelessly borrows a Carl Orff theme that was already made famous by its use in Terrence Malick's "Badlands" for its score and reproduces Mike Leigh's naturalistic atmospheres without the humour and a single glimmer of hope. Should the viewer feel like cleansing his palate after this ordeal, may I recommend two films on the same subject, the poetry and terrors of childhood? They are just as rewarding but without the vomit-inducing sadism and body fluids. They are:

(1) "The Steamroller and The Violin"/"Katok i skripka", 1960, URSS, a 42-minute student film by Andrei Tarkovsky, one of the loveliest films ever put together on planet Earth (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053987/), and

(2) "The Children Are Watching Us"/"Bambini ci guardano", Vittorio DeSica's first collaboration with neo-realist screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, 1943, an almost forgotten classic, finally on Criterion DVD (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034493/).

The opening shot of Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher is unlike any I have ever seen. With the soundtrack absent, we see the image of young boy wrapped in a set of curtains, twirling around, having a ball. Suddenly, a hand comes from off-screen and slaps the boy in the head, snapping us into the reality of the moment. It's the boy's mother, who insists that he stop playing around and go outside. Filmed in choppy slow-motion, the image of the boy in the curtain is both beautiful and foretelling. The curtains suggest the image of a body bag, something the boy will eventually need when he goes outside moments later and drowns in a filth-infested pond.

The idea of innocence mired in poverty is the theme of Ratcatcher, one of the most amazing debut films I have seen. This is a wholly original work, complete with poetic visuals and haunting atmosphere. If I were to describe it as anything, I'd say it's like The 400 Blows meets George Washington but directed by Alan Parker. To say this, however, would be to suggest that this stunning first film is in some way unoriginal. Nothing could be further from the truth. With this one film, Lynne Ramsay has given me images that I will never forget. Some are too special to describe in print and I will only say that they capture the dream-like innocence of childhood like no other film.

Despite these wonderful images, Ratcatcher is at once a very dreary, grimy film. It takes place during the Glasgow garbage strike of 1973. The streets nothing more than garbage-strewn paths for rats to feast upon and spread disease. There is lice, there is dirt, there are damp and muddy canals. And there is James (William Eadie). James is the Dumbo-eared hero of the film - a feeble, pale-faced lad who has seen all too much in his twelve short years. His father is a tough drunk with a heart, his mother a free-spirited, sometimes battered housewife, his older sister a sexually curious teen, and his younger sister the forever-playful picture of innocence. James is caught in the middle, attempting to come to terms with his blossoming identity and sexual drive. Among other things in this poverty-stricken environment, James is dealing with the death of his friend, the boy who drowned in the canal. Indeed James was there when the boy drowned, and he may have had something to do with it. But this traumatic event simply fuels James' need to escape.

The film could definitely be categorized as a coming-of-age picture, but that would be cheating it. Like many great films, Ratcatcher redefines its genre. The path of discovery for James is harrowing and painful, but like anyone's experience -- unique. As the images I mentioned before suggest, James' growth is not without its moments of beauty and tranquility. There is an episode in the film where James randomly takes a bus to the outskirts of town. He is unaware where the bus will take him and really doesn't care. As he travels farther from his town we can almost feel the garbage and dirt sifting away. He comes upon a small area of land where a newly developed housing project is being constructed. This might as well be a million miles from where he came from. James is alone amongst the yellow corn fields and fresh saw dust. Here he loses himself in the moment, walking through the yet-to-be-built homes with wide-eyes and a wider smile. The ensuing growth of this area represents the growth of James himself. There are shots here that are too rich for words, but are so perfect, so lyrical, I wanted to wallpaper my house with them.

With this one film, it's clear as the yellow corn fields that she depicts so brilliantly, that Lynne Ramsay is a director to be reckoned with. Her visual style left me speechless at points and her screenplay moved me beyond words. The ending of the film lives up to the rest. Nothing finalized, nothing set in stone. Just a wonderfully ambiguous moment that could be interpreted in a number of ways. This is a film that brought me back to the time of growing up. Not in any specific way, but in way where the small details transcend the familiar. If that time in my life were to flash before me in some dream-like, cinematic montage, it would undoubtedly include moments not unlike many I saw in Ratcatcher. Ramsay is able to present the pain, the wonder, the mischief of it all. And images. Images I will never forget.

Ratcatcher utterly surprised me. Not because of the talking, which I hardly understood at all (I'm Austrian), but because of the surprising scarcity of dialogues. I doubt that there was a single situation where any of the protagonists talked for more than five seconds in a row. That's why the movie wasn't that difficult to grasp, as most of the plot was primarily carried by images and stunning shots of William Eadie's character. I guess that there were minutes where no-one actually said a word for a long time - which makes this movie maybe the movie with the least words spoken I've ever seen. Concerning its plot - it's very much reminiscent of Kes. You get a first-hand insight into the bleak and dull existence those kids in Glasgow have to endure. James is suffering from thorough disillusion. The sequences when you actually see him smile - which are two or three maybe - are thus real highlights of the movie. He is the one who bears the emotional burden of the movie. I particularly liked the scene when he was lying on the sofa and his young sister places herself next to him. The other highlight was when he took the bus and found this solitary house and the grain field, where he experienced some kind of relief from his tough life. The ending was ambiguous. I suppose he actually did drown himself - and the last image show his dreams of his family moving away from their bleak existence towards a brighter future - a future he thinks is only possible without him. Just think of the young girl holding the Miro towards the sky - and then you see James' face. And you see him drown again right when the credits start.

The drowning of a young boy is snuck almost inconspicuously into the world of 70s Glasgow, where slinging mud into faces down at the dingy canal is considered leisure. The community barely pauses to acknowledge the death, as if it is simply a fact of life, causing James, who holds himself responsible, further distress. While the rescue of another boy from a similar demise is celebrated as a miracle (in a similarly dingy ceremony in a dingy church), Ryan Quinn becomes a statistic. What is intriguing about Lynne Ramsay's debut film is how it initially positions us from Ryan's perspective, presenting James as the seeming bully, before asking us to consider his personal struggle for redemption.

Ramsay pokes his camera into neglected domestic corners on the edge of society, building on social realist representations of Britain in the vein of filmmakers like Ken Loach and Terence Davies, but with a grimier lens. These families are caught in a punishing paradox; their conditions are barely livable, but this only serves to greaten their chances of being chosen by housing commission inspectors to move into new dwellings on golden Elysium fields out into the country. The transition is as literal as it is metaphorical. For James, scampering between half-erected kitchens and spotless bathtubs, he is reenacting the life that he never received. It's also one of the few times that Rachel Portman's sparse score springs into life, steady beats of the synthesizer and plucks of the guitar providing non-diegetic solace that the urban city cannot (and a voice for a boy who has no voice). The scene is something of a transcendent, out-of-body experience, as James approaches the window that promises the golden wheat fields outside, and clambers over the sill as if entering a painting hung on the wall. It serves as pure escapism in the same sad way that the family perch in front of the television, serenaded by Tom Jones. The room also doubles as a bathroom for washing in troughs of metal, not white porcelain.

But for that one moment of freedom the rest of his life is dreary and confronting. William Eadie steps into the role with little wiggle room, allowed a singularly pinched expression, perpetually crestfallen, and his pupils rapt with attention in terror and anxiety. His thin limbs hang helplessly at his sides, unable to stand up against the sexual abuse of his friend at the hands of juveniles. When he and Margaret lay in bed later that night, she asks, "James, do you love me?" What a question in this world. How can he possibly know the answer, when his only models are a violent father, a muted mother and a band of hooligans? Earlier on, Margaret attempts to 'flirt' by placing his hand on her upper thigh, offering her body to the only person who doesn't use her for it. Neither know how to proceed. The rats have soiled their innocence.

Lynne Ramsay has made a name for herself as an intuitive storyteller, one who values the intimate, minute details of the screen's image. The less clutter in the frame, the better the narrative is served. Consider how she makes the simple re-gifting of a pair of shoes into a devastating blow. Or how she depicts brother and sister, after having spent an entire lifetime looking in the wrong places for love, curl up into each other on a couch. Through our patient observation, we know there is nowhere else for them to lie. In the end, Ramsay asks us not to judge, but allows us to understand what James does in plunging into that river, to atone for sins that may or may not be his burden.

Ratcatcher, released in 1999, was the feature directorial debut of Lynne Ramsay, who has forged a reputation as one of Britain's best directors, if not its most prolific. Set in Glasgow in 1973, the film follows James Gillespie, a boy growing up in a grimy housing project who spends his days playing by the canal, where his friend Kenny drowns early on in the film. There's a lot of familiar ground covered here, with a working class coming-of-age story featuring bullies, gangs, sexual awakenings and grinding poverty. It's all unremittingly grim, and it sounds not entirely unlike a social realist film from the likes of Ken Loach. It doesn't however, look like one.

Ratcatcher establishes Ramsay's style of filmmaking from the opening scene, which shows James playing inside a net curtain in his home in slow motion; when the camera speeds up, the curtain's grubbiness and the dingy it frames become apparent, but until the moment it is a strikingly beautiful image. Whilst Ratcatcher lacks the budget of Ramsay's later films, it shares the same visual flair: against a backdrop of imprisoned fathers, knife attacks, and rotting concrete littered with bin bags and dead rats, Ramsay demonstrates that she can find magic and beauty in the darkest of places, with help from cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler (it's his debut feature too). Thus, James' trip on the bus feels like an odyssey to a strange new world outside of his normal experiences, as he explores a building site, then climbs out of a window to run joyously through a field of wheat. Later, there's a wonderfully bizarre sequence in which James' friend Kenny's pet mouse is tied to a helium balloon and James imagines it being carried to the Moon, there to join dozens of other mice living happily on Earth' satellite.

Ramsay also wrote Ratcatcher and like her subsequent films, it is often light on dialogue, with lengthy scenes featuring no dialogue and the story unfolding via facial expressions, actions and events. Ramsay's approach to storytelling is to show rather than tell, arguably to a far greater extent than most film directors. Much happens whilst going unsaid: any guilt James feels over Kenny's death is left unaddressed by the dialogue, instead lingering in the look on his face when Kenny's mother gives him a pair of the dead boy's shoes. The sequence of James exploring at the end of the bus line is filmed without words, with only the elegant, unobtrusive score from Rachel Portman to accompany it.

This approach requires a level of talent from the cast and careful direction from the director. Aside from Tommy Flanagan, most of the actors are unknown (one of them is Ramsay's niece), which adds to the facade of realism but is particularly notable for the fact that without exception they all give convincing performances. Young William Eadie, who's acting career seems to have fizzled out in the intervening years, gives an impressively naturalistic performance as James.

Synopses of Ratcatcher make it sound depressing and often unpleasant. At times it is, but at the same time it manages to be curiously uplifting, with the small positives of James' life seeming to outweigh the negatives, at least in his dreams, his hopes and imagination. It's a very solid debut by any standards and essential viewing for fans of Ramsay's all-too-slowly growing body of work.