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Released by: Fun City Editions
Released on: February 22nd, 2022.
Director: Lynne Ramsay
Cast: Samantha Morton, Kathleen McDermott
Year: 2002
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Morvern Callar – Movie Review:
Directed by Lynn Ramsay, who co-wrote the screenplay with Liana Dognini based on a novel by Alan Warner, 2002's Morvern Callar stars Samantha Morton in the titular role, a young woman who wakes up one fine Christmas morning to find that her boyfriend has committed suicide. He wrote her a note on the computer and made a screensaver that said ‘READ ME’ on it so she’s see it. She doesn’t tell anyone about this, going about her job at the local supermarket as normal, and when someone asks her where he’s been, she tells him that he’s run off with another woman and left her. Once his body has been on the floor a few days, she decides to do something about it and proceeds to chop him into bits, her Sony Walkman taped to her body as she does it.
With her boyfriend now cut into small, more portable pieces she heads out into the remote hills nearby and buries him, never bothering to tell anyone what’s happened before then leaving Scotland for a vacation in Spain with her best friend/party girl Lanna (Kathleen McDermott), paying for it with the money he left behind for his funeral. She also changes the credit on the novel he’d finished before his passing so that she’s listed as the author, and even submits it for publication.
Set to a soundtrack culled from a mixed tape made for our titular character by her deceased beloved featuring tracks by The Velvet Underground, Can, Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood, Aphex Twin, Stereolab, Ween, Boards Of Canada, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, The Mamas And The Papas and quite a few others and shot by cinematographer Alwin Küchler, Morvern Callar is as dark as it is fascinating and well-made. It’s clear that Morvern, after finding her boyfriend’s body, dealing with grief but she does so in such unconventional ways that, initially at least, we don’t necessarily know why she’s doing what she does. As the story progresses, and her character evolves, we get the impression that she’s doing what she does out of not only sadness and grief but out of spite and anger as well. Does she see him taking his own life as the act of ultimate selfishness? It would explain some of her actions if she did – using up the money left to bury him, taking credit and then payment for the book that he finished and using the money to go party with her hedonistic friend and leaving behind the gloomy locale of Scotland to part in sunny Ibiza.
Samantha Morton is excellent in the lead role. Her character is quiet, introverted, she doesn’t talk much at all and yet we feel what she feels thanks to Morton’s fantastic use of facial expressions and body language to communicate what her is going through. She and Kathleen McDermott have an odd chemistry together, but it works. They’re very good friends, that much is clear, but they’re polar opposites in a lot of ways. Samantha seems to try to get in on the ‘fun’ that Lanna is having, but it doesn’t quite work out that way.
The end result is a strange but definitely compelling film – part character study, part horror picture and part road trip, all shot with an eye for artistic lighting and composition and which does a great job of mixing sound and vision to create a wholly unique viewing experience.
Morvern Callar – Blu-ray Review:
Fun City Editions offers up Morvern Callar on Region Free Blu-ray in an AVC encoded 1080p high definition presentation framed at 1.85.1 widescreen with the ninety-eight minute feature taking up 21.9GBs of space on the 25GB disc. Presented “newly scanned & restored in 2k from 35mm interpositive,” the picture quality here is quite strong. Colors look great, always nice and natural, and we get really strong black levels as well. There might be a few minor compression artifacts here and there in some of the darker sequences but otherwise, there’s nothing to complain about here. The picture is clean, crisp and very nicely detailed with good depth and texture throughout.
The only audio option for the feature itself is a 24-bit DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio track in English with optional subtitles provided in English only. This is a fairly dialogue driven film but the surround channels definitely come to life during the film’s more active moments, like the party or club scenes. The track is balanced well and quite clean and it does a nice job of spreading around its score quite nicely, creating some depth and a few scenes that are pretty immersive.
Extras start off with an audio commentary with film historians Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson that goes over the source material adapted for the film, details director Lynne Ramsay’s work and career as well as her style and that goes into a lot of detail about how this film compares to other pictures that deal with grief and loss as a central theme. There’s some very interesting discussion here about what makes this film as effective as it is, the visuals, the score, the performances and lots more. It’s a highbrow talk to be sure, but a very listenable one that does a nice job of peeling back some of the layers of the movie.
Somewhere Beautiful is a new seven minute video essay by Chris O'Neill narrated by Claire Loy that spends quite a bit of time discussing the novel that the movie is based on as well as the differences between what’s on the screen and what’s on the page, how the film makes its differences work, the importance of the film’s point of view, the way that the film deals with grief and how the aesthetics reflect its lead character’s state of mind.
Finishing up the extra on the disc are original U.K. and U.S. theatrical trailers, menus and chapter selection options. As to the packaging, this release comes with an insert booklet that contains an essay on the film called Modes Of Grief In Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar by K.J. Relth-Miller, a second essay titled When Can Met Warp Records by Margaret Barto-Fumo and some cast and crew info. Additionally, Fun City Editions provides some nice reversible cover sleeve artwork.
Morvern Callar - The Final Word:
Morvern Callar is a strangely moving picture, a dark, sad film that manages to draw you in thanks to some expert direction and a great performance from Samantha Morton. The Blu-ray release from Fun City Editions looks and sounds very good and it contains some interesting supplements as well. Highly recommended.
I just wanted to let you know that there is a typo in the title ; it says "Movern Callar" instead of "MoRvern Callar" ;-)