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Home / Articles / Essays / You Were Never Really Here / Ramsay’s characters escape trauma through sensations

Elena Lazic / April 12, 2018

Ramsay’s characters escape trauma through sensations

Lynne Ramsay’s features centre on characters dealing with trauma by losing themselves in sensations, not language. This is the seventh feature in our Special Issue on You Were Never Really Here.

Lynne Ramsay, Ratcatcher
Still from Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher

In each of her four features, Lynne Ramsay focuses on a powerless witness to events so traumatic that they can never be repaired or reversed. In her feature debut Ratcatcher, a young boy living in a Glasgow housing project during The Troubles accidentally drowns a child he is playing with. Morvern Callar, Ramsay’s sophomore film, opens in a gloomy apartment, completely silent but for the hypnotic, lulling buzz of blinking Christmas lights, on the titular character caressing the body of her dead boyfriend. In We Need To Talk About Kevin, Tilda Swinton’s Eva Khatchadourian becomes numb after her sociopathic son murders his father, his sister, and a dozen schoolmates. And in Ramsay’s most recent film You Were Never Really Here, flashbacks reveal that contract killer Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is traumatised both from witnessing his father beat his mother as a child and from his experiences in the army and law enforcement.

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Filed Under: Articles, Essays, You Were Never Really Here Tagged With: career in focus, Female Directors, Grief, Mental illness, ywnrh

Elena Lazic

Elena Lazic is a French student and writer based in London who has written for Little White Lies, Sight and Sound and The Guardian.

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