Time to Chop Up the Dead Boyfriend: The Wanton Strangeness of Morvern Callar

Watching a Lynne Ramsay movie means marinating in bleakness. Cheer is in short supply. Abiding empathy for besieged souls aside, Ramsay mires her stories in gloom (at best) and doom (at worst), chronicling the travails of the common man, the shell-shocked, and, for want of more a precise term, the damned. Think of her movies as monuments of nihilism. Their substance is anguish. But Ramsay tends to throw that anguish into sharp relief. You Were Never Really Here, We Need to Talk About Kevin and Ratcatcher aren’t easily digested, but they’re easily understood. Her cinema speaks with perfect clarity.
Morvern Callar is the glaring exception to the coherence of Ramsay’s filmmaking: It’s a ghoulish enigma, a slice of weird in a career peppered by the surreal. Ratcatcher features a shot of a mouse colony on the moon. You Were Never Really Here laces a violent reality with violent delusions. We Need to Talk About Kevin, arguably the most grounded of the bunch, reads like a waking nightmare through its flashback structure. But none of these films ask Samantha Morton to hack up her dead boyfriend’s body and bury his parts in a serene mountaintop clearing. Contrasted with Morvern Callar, their idiosyncrasies are downright quaint.
Surprisingly, it’s the details Morvern Callar has in common with the rest of Ramsay’s filmography that make it stand out. Its title character, a 21-year-old working at a supermarket in a sleepy Scottish port town, has her own struggles, financial difficulties and personal woes to deal with, starting in the movie’s opening sequence. Waking on Christmas day to find that your boyfriend has committed suicide by the blinking lights of the tree you dressed together is a horror movie unto itself; the shock of her discovery is enough to make the viewer go as numb as Morvern. But that’s the root of Morvern Callar’s ambiguity. Most of us might expect Morvern to break down, to call the police, or even call a friend. Instead she does, well, nothing.
Morvern strokes his back as if checking for signs of life, runs her hand down his arm, lays her hand in his, her breathing wet and raspy all the while. It’s not as if she, on seeing her boyfriend’s corpse, erupts in cheers, or stares blankly into space (though she does lift cash from his pocket). But the body’s still on the floor when she decides to dress up and go out partying with her friend, Lanna (Kathleen McDermott), which presumably is not what the average person would do if faced with final proof of their significant other’s mortality. Morvern, at this point, is clearly not your average person. She lies to Lanna about her new relationship status for reasons Ramsay never discloses to us. Maybe she’s in denial. Maybe she’s just dumbfounded and heartbroken. Maybe she really just doesn’t give a shit. Morvern is a mystery.
It’s possible Lanna is an accoutrement of a sort for Morvern, an accessory she wears out to clubs and on holiday; Lanna lives her life from moment to moment, constantly on the prowl for her next experience, be it with drugs, a man, both or anything else that she can use to distract herself from real life. Together, they’re anarchy on four legs. Morvern likes a good time, too, but she’s not as single-minded as Lanna, in part because she has a rotting ex-boyfriend taking up space in her flat. Of course, we never get to see Morvern in a normal state of being—she’s well beyond normalcy from the moment the film opens, as evidenced by a sequence where Morvern dismembers the deceased wearing only her underwear and her aviators as The Velvet Underground supplies her soundtrack.
The burial of her boyfriend occurs after Morvern deletes his name from his manuscript, letter by letter, replaces it with her own, and ships it off to a publisher. If you’re looking for the source of Morvern Callar’s wanton strangeness, it’s this sequence of events. We can give her a pass for having a night on the town. If that’s how she deals with death, then that’s how she deals with death. You might behave erratically, too, if your loved one committed suicide on Christmas. It’s how she deals post-death that matters.
There’s so much left untold regarding Morvern’s life that it’s difficult to levy any kind of informed judgment. We don’t know, after all, what kind of man he was—good or bad, kind or abusive. She might be better off without him. Then again, she might be using his death as a way out of her dreary life, literally: The money Morvern’s boyfriend left her to pay for a funeral goes instead to a spontaneous holiday to Spain. Is she a victim newly freed from a bad situation? Is she a vulture feasting on the scraps her boyfriend left behind? The lingering question of her morality is never fully answered, which is for the best. If we knew everything, the movie wouldn’t have much of a point.