Ramsay's inspired debut offers a bracing and direct response to the intertwined traditions of kitchen sink realism and miserabilist humanism so central to British cinema. Reimagining her childhood Glasgow from the point of view of an obdurate twelve-year-old boy, Ramsay embraced an offbeat, at moments unexpectedly whimsical, sense of magic realism to create a world simultaneously imbued with innocence and menacing threat and peopled by a cast of deeply sympathetic yet unsettlingly ambiguous characters. Ratcatcher 's interest in unconventional narrative is announced almost immediately by the unexpected twist that inverts its opening scene. Set during Scotland's notorious garbage strikes of the early 1970s, Ratcatcher uses the trash heaps and fetid canals of its Glasgow housing projects to describe a reversal of the natural order in which death and slow decay become transformative gravitational forces. – HG