Characters in Fragments: Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar

Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar is only the director’s second feature film, but crystallizes a style that she’s honed over two decades. Ramsay gives you character studies in intense, vague visuals. In her best known work, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), the protagonist’s everyday life is intercut with flashbacks in primary colors: traffic lights and fruity pebble cereal, the red of blood and of paint defacing her home, the yellow-tipped arrows her son shoots in the past and the yellow-tinged bottles of medication she consumes in the present-day. You Were Never Really Here (2017) reveals its main character’s suicidal ideation and debilitating PTSD not through words but through dead-eyed gazes, fragmented flashbacks, and moments of solitude where, away from prying eyes, his mask slips. 

In Ramsay’s Morvern Callar, which screened at AFS Cinema last month, the eponymous Morvern’s interior life is also revealed through flashes of color and muted chaos. The camera burns key images into your mind within the first five minutes: A dead man’s slit wrists; a puddle of blood in the kitchen behind him; to the side, a flickering desktop computer whose white screen says READ ME in block text. We’re given the puzzle pieces needed to immediately center ourselves in the story of Morvern (Samantha Morton). Her partner James is the dead man, the suicide note left on the computer—”Sorry Morvern”—instructing her to print out his completed novel and send it to a publisher. 

Instead of calling the police that night, Morvern celebrates New Year’s Eve. She tells her best friend and coworker Lanna (Kathleen McDermott) that James “left her,” not explaining further. The dead body and puddle of blood fade into the background of Morvern’s life, untouched, for several days. And when Morvern does send in James’s manuscript, she does so under her own name. 

These almost grotesque acts of carelessness are intercut with moments driving home the reality of her grief. We’re shown, not told, that Morvern is in denial, as she performs acrobatic leaps—eyes seemingly closed—to skirt the dead body in the threshold of her kitchen. We watch her try to believe her own lies to Lanna about James having moved abroad. As she does menial tasks at her supermarket job, there’s an emptiness in her gaze that belies deep pain, not boredom.

Morvern isn’t easily readable, but the film uses all five senses to bring you directly into her world. When Morvern moves James’ body into the bathtub several days after his death, you can almost smell the crisp Febreze she douses her apartment with in what must be a failed attempt to cover the scent of bodily rot and decay. In the mountains where Morvern eventually buries his dismembered body, the camera lingers as she runs her hand along a branch and presses her fingers down into a muddy stream. At home and later in public, Morvern blasts the mixtape James made her before his death, and we move from her perspective to the external as the audio shifts from the full sound in her headphones to the too-loud noise you’d hear sitting next to her. 

Each of these moments feel almost painfully intimate, alternating between glimpses into her psyche that inspire sympathy and external perspectives that elicit disgust. This subtextual imagery encourages reading between the lines and drawing your own conclusions about Morvern’s motivations and her choices. Her actions might at first seem unintelligible—but anyone who’s lost someone knows the weird variability of grief. Pretending your loved one isn’t dead, just gone away, is the easiest response to soul-crushing grief. And shoving that grief deep down and far away can sometimes feel like the only way to go on its wake.

Morvern is graceless and blunt, and entirely human, pushing those close to her away and spinning out to whatever feels good and whatever makes sense in the moment. It’s a testament to Ramsey’s storytelling that we learn this not through the text itself, but through the first- and third-hand perspectives she gives us. And this would fail without Samantha Morton’s riveting performance. Morton fills the character with a depth of pathos communicated through a deadened gaze or a deep breath of relief. With few words, Morton and Ramsey transform Morvern into an intense one-woman exploration of grief.

At every turn, expectations as to where the plot may go are subverted. No one discovers the truth behind the suicide; and instead of following the fallout of the death or the details of the dead man’s novel, the movie spins out into a holiday Morvern takes with Lanna in Spain, moving us from hostels to raves to small village towns. We watch Morvern start to unfurl in these scenes. In a new country, with the promise of money that the potential publishing deal brings, Morvern finally escapes her life back home. She loses the deadweight she must see as holding her down throughout the journey, whether it’s a suitcase or her grief or, ultimately, the companionship of her one friend.

In one of the final scenes, Ramsey once again shows us the difference between Morvern as the audience knows her and how she’s perceived externally. When she sits down with representatives from the publishing company for the first time, new dress on and hair scraped back, her naivete is on full display—at least to the audience who’s followed her story this far. But the cosmopolitan publishers who are desperate to sign the next great writer mistake her awkward silences and blank gaze for calm and cool negotiation. 
While that’s how I read the scene, one of my fellow audience members saw it as the publishers eagerly taking advantage of Morvern’s inexperience. This just reinforces the themes of the film: Morvern remains unknown to her friends, to her lovers, to the audience, and maybe even to herself. But in the end we’ve watched as Morvern claws herself out of the life she leads not with style, but with a tenacity that’s hard not to admire.