• It’s a strong debut from Ramsay; grim, stark, certainly fits the sub-genre poetic realism but mainly she’s started her narrative trend here and has a clear talent for arresting imagery
  • Lots of squalor, the mise-en-scene loaded with filled garbage bags in the street
  • Starts with suffocating in curtain much like Phoenix in the plastic in You Were Never Really Here in 2017
  • Like all of Ramsay’s films the central character is in a traumatic experience (death of a child here that he is the cause of) and the rest of the film with float along with him—he’s not as zombie-like as the Samantha Morton, Tilda or Phoenix characters
  • It’s a montage film- built in the editing room
  • Much of it is silent cinema- strong photography
  • Very grey coloring- washed out
  • Sunless Scotland—grim
  • Impenetrably authentic dialogue
  • Part neo-realism (like Rossellini in WW2 rubble in Germany War Zero) and part magical or poetic realism- we have, at 40 minutes in, the character hop on a bus to a nice empty house with a field—we also have a mouse tied to a balloon going off of the planet earth to what sounds like the music from Terrence Malick’s Badlands
  • A sweet mother and an angry drunk father
  • Similar to 2000’s George Washington from David Gordon Green
  • We have a great shot at that house in the country of the window frame with the wheat field in the background- Ramsay uses the window as her own frame- like Renoir did- she goes back to this at least three times- gorgeous
  • Is the ending a dream escapes or real? Did he drown or was he saved? Ironic smile
  • Recommend /HR border