Morvern Callar | Review

Morton’s search for self is focal point of film, but try not to blink or you might miss the character peeling away her emotional layers.

Borrowing from the avant-garde auteur cinema, U.K film director Lynn Ramsey’s portrait of youth is presented in a fountain of emotionless emotions, where the film’s protagonist an oddly named girl, (Samantha Morton-Minority Report) follows in a life which would be best described as a gravitational pull of self after a ‘silenced’ shock occurs.

Movern Caller is about the nocturnal instincts that protect one girl from her loss—the bloody dead body centrally sprawled out on the floor of a small apartment is the cause of her stunned temperament. She opens her Christmas presents as the bloodied dead body lays rather inconveniently on the floor, but it’s what is on her beau’s lab-top and bank account that liberates her from any sense of consciousness or responsibility. A gravitational escape to the sunny south with her Scottish wanker best friend brings about a second act that emphasizes a liberation of sorts, but the film suffers from an apparent lack of narrative in favor for a filmic notion which emphasizes the character’s emotional escape and metal numbness.

Perhaps what caught Ramsey’s attention in the young actress was her fantastic performance in Sweet & Lowdown which demanded plenty from the actress in terms of displaying a wide range of emotions which is full utilized in this picture. With an improvisational-like performance and a hand-held positioned camera, and Ramsey captures her nakedness by stripping her down to the bone both in an emotion sense and literal sense. However, there is still a distance,–we can never quite figure out the intentions of the character nor do we come to understand her sense of logic and how she can be so be so emotionally distant from herself. It is easy to comprehend her reasoning for switching the names on her boyfriend’s novel, but her penny-pinching ways of a solution to the dead body in the apartment is perhaps a bad example of explaining the character’s desperation.

The film rides on Morton’s portrayal, she carries the film effectively, but there are too many loose-ended parts in a narrative where many questions go unanswered and Ramsey tends to lean more towards the art part of the film where the visuals elaborates and texturizes the character. The frame composition and mise-en-scene lend a hand in providing a deeper sense of depth to the film’s central character by covering the foreign forms and shapes found in locations such as the isolated apartment, the drug trips and the contradiction between the wet and cold initial colors of the film for the warmer colors found in the location shooting in Spain.

For some, Morvern Caller could be a frustrating experience and can be challenging at times for its lack of ‘reel’ purpose and though Morton thoroughly embodies her character she is still emotionally distant, never bringing us closer to her and thus making for a difficult character to grasp and therefore the youthful euphoric parts of the second half are not as vital as they should appear to be.

Rating 2 stars