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A Life at the Pictures: A Conversation with Lynne Ramsay

An uncompromising chronicler of grief and its aftershocks, Scottish writer-director Lynne Ramsay turns her characters inside out, evoking their inner worlds with a lyrical style that reveals the sharp eye she has honed since her early days as a photographer. From the shot of a boy wrapped in a lace curtain that begins her 1999 debut feature, Ratcatcher, to the image of Christmas lights flickering on motionless bodies in 2002’s Morvern Callar, the most memorable moments in her work demonstrate her ability to infuse a single frame with complex emotion and to interweave sound and image to haunting effect. The troubled figure at the center of Ramsay’s disquieting new thriller You Were Never Really Here is a hit man (Joaquin Phoenix) who uncovers a conspiracy while searching for a kidnapped teenager. But as with all of the director’s work, the plot is only part of her all-encompassing vision. Boiling the narrative down to pulp-fiction basics, she conveys the protagonist’s psychological state through her masterful control of atmosphere, created with the help of Phoenix’s unhinged performance and Jonny Greenwood’s menacing score.

Just before the release of You Were Never Really Here, which won prizes for best actor and best screenplay at Cannes last year, I sat down with Ramsay to chat about her early moviegoing life in Glasgow, the version of herself that emerges on set, and the mind-expanding power of chess.

Read on at Criterion’s The Current