Ratcatcher

his relentlessly grim story about the misery, alienation, survival, sexual awakening and dreams of a 12-year-old James (William Eadie) is set in the early 1970s Glasgow slums during a garbage strike. The lad drowns a neighborhood boy in a canal behind their apartments, becomes immersed in guilt, strikes up a relationship with an older lass and fantasizes about sharing a new suburban home with his alcoholic father, mother and two sisters. Lynne Ramsay gives the film a startling lyricism at times as the film explores the casual cruelty of children and the Catch 22’s of poverty. The accents are so thick that the film is subtitled.