Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #61006 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-10-19
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 97 minutes

Amazon.com
Eerie, morbid, yet somehow life-affirming, Morvern Callar stars the superb Samantha Morton (Sweet and Lowdown, Minority Report) as the title character, a young Scottish woman whose boyfriend has just killed himself, leaving behind a cassette of assorted songs and an unpublished novel. Instead of reporting his death, Morvern puts her name on his novel before sending it off to a publisher, then uses the dead man's bank card to pay for a trip to Spain with her friend Lana (Kathleen McDermott), where she tries to lose herself in sensation and chaos. The events of Morvern Callar suggest a story, but director Lynn Ramsay (Ratcatcher) focuses on moments of ambiguity and ambivalence in between the dramatic action--and when Morvern does take decisive action, her choices are unnerving. The movie's striking images and rich use of color vividly capture a dislocated state of mind, when life has come unmoored from meaning. --Bret Fetzer

From The New Yorker
Samantha Morton plays the title character in Lynne Ramsay's dark and sensuous portrait of a young Scottish woman who, after her boyfriend's suicide, embarks on an existential journey, as mesmerizing and baffling to her as it is to the audience. As she travels from a dead-end job to a European holiday (accompanied by her best friend, played with party-animal enthusiasm by Kathleen McDermott), the movie's slow narrative tempo begins to entrance. Morton's performance, easily her best, is charismatically impassive. There's a gorgeous strangeness to Ramsay's movie, a distinctive and alluring visual language, and a sound design that keeps the dialogue to a minimum-the film feels like it's floating in ether. -Bruce Diones
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Credit for acting but not for much else
The cast is quite good in this film, and perhaps some of the music, but the rest of it is unfocused, plodding, and trying to look artsy and mesmerizing by having no sound at all in the early scenes and then showing the main character examining twigs or windows or other things, as if it were meaningful to do so.
It's also impossible to be interested in the protagonist, who disposes of her suicidal boyfriend's body after leaving it in their flat for a while so she can go out and party for the sake of distraction. Then she replaces his name on his novel with hers, gets it accepted and gets the money and credit that should have gone to him.
Later, she drags her best friend out of a hotel in Spain, gets them lost in the wilderness and then abandons her pal.
Sheesh!

confused
I'm not sure why one is supposed to like or sympathise with the protagonist . She performs one dispicable act after another . Abandoning her friend in the desert , stealing money for her boyfriend's funeral , lying about the authorship of a novel , not to mention the disrespect of the corpse . An interesting movie worth seeing but the title character is a horrible person and I got the feeling the filmakers wanted the viewer to like her , why , I don't know .

Trainspotting minus plot, with truncated songs
Let's skip my usual ostentatious introductory paragraph this time and get right to the heart of the matter -- or rather lack thereof, because Good Lord, I just cannot say enough awful things about this movie.

Let's start with the plot. It opens with a dead body in an apartment and that, honestly, is the MOST EXCITING PART OF THE ENTIRE MOVIE. To save you time, here is a complete and total spoiler of this film: vapid semi-attractive mannequin's boyfriend commits suicide, leaving her money for funeral, a novel he wrote, and a mixtape. She publishes his novel as her own, disposes of the corpse, uses money to go to Ibiza with her equally horrible best girlfriend, and sporadically fast-forwards through the lovingly-crafted mixtape the whole while.

That's it! No resolution, no moral, no point whatsoever. It's like MTV Spring Break with Scottish people. In fact the only redeeming part of the film is the soundtrack, which is used so haphazardly and with such severe editing that you may as well be listening to a Negativland album.

Artsy-fartsy types will laud the film for its cinematography. I'm sorry, but if I want long, ponderous shots of random nonsense, I'll watch Baraka, which at least TRIES to have some sort of depth and sincerity; Morvern Callar has neither of these attributes, and in fact seems to regard them with abject scorn and mockery.

I gave up an hour into this movie, because I honestly DON'T CARE HOW IT ENDS. If this is the sort of garbage Warp Records is willing to license their music to, the underground is in bad shape, jack.