Lynn Ramsey drew such a fertile atmosphere for psychological drama from her childhood, when politics turned her city into a medieval Hamelin. The desire to reveal the inner world of a child forced to live in such conditions, to get to the bottom of the psychology of his characters is the main feature of this film.
Nothing helps you go deeper than someone’s near death. At the very beginning of the film, James unwittingly becomes a participant in the death of his friend Ryan. For the first time, you always learn about the fragility of life a few minutes later than you should. And now a boy drowned in a foul-smelling canal will be a shadow over everything James sees, hears or says. While the local guys have fun with the old fool Margaret, James makes a real friendship with her. While the guys mock the feelings of Kenny, who received Snowball for his birthday – a “domestic” white rat, James rushes to remove the animal from awkward hands.
In all this is an attempt to protect loved ones from the danger that they hide in themselves, seemingly familiar things like the eternally dirty water of the channel or games surrounded by hordes of rats. It turns out that early adulthood is not about getting used to abnormalities, but about separating oneself from an environment where trash under the house is considered an acceptable means of political struggle. According to Ramsey, the ratcatcher only takes away those who are still willing to change the world for the better. And adults who change children to a garbage dump are incapable of this.
And James, like Snow, is carried away from the rotten slums. There, where the last bus stop whitewashed new unfinished houses, the policy of the conservatives became inaccessible to people like James’ father. There, where the moon became a huge piece of cheese, and the window stretched endless cereal fields - serene, like a long-awaited Sunday day in the family.
9 out of 10
Original