After coming home to find that her novelist boyfriend has died by suicide, the title character in Morvern Callar (Samantha Morton) makes a curious decision: she decides to do nothing. And so the bloody body remains in her apartment for days—splayed just a few feet from a blinking Christmas tree, which she also doesn’t bother to address. Is she operating out of shock, anger, sorrow, or something else? We’re left to largely interpret on our own, as Morton gives an intensely interior performance built on blank stares. Even after she leaves the apartment to party with her best friend (Kathleen McDermott), Morven is a woman of few words (none of them mention her dead boyfriend). Based on the Alan Warner novel and co-written by director Lynne Ramsay and Liana Dognini, Morvern Callar finds a new gear when it leaves Morvern’s chilly Scottish port city for a holiday in Spain. There, she meets a stranger in a hotel (Raife Patrick Burchell) after impulsively knocking on the door of his room. “My mum’s dead,” he tells her, and what follows is a strange sex scene that doubles as a mourning ritual. Ramsay, whose Ratcatcher was noxiously obsessed with the miseries of life in a 1970s Glasgow housing complex, finds a locus in Morvern’s stunned grief. Morvern Callar is equally bleak, but to a purpose.
(11/8/2025)
