Morvern Callar DVD Review

Movern Callar (Samantha Morton) awakens Christmas morning to find her writer boyfriend dead in a pool of blood, lying in the doorway from the living room to the kitchen. He has committed suicide because, as his note to Morvern on his computer indicates, "it just felt like the right thing to do." Morvern doesn't call the police, she doesn't freak out (at least not in a traditional sense). She opens her presents: a leather jacket, a cigarette lighter, and a mix tape that will provide much of the accompanying soundtrack for the rest of the film. Then she goes out partying with her best friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott), telling no one about what has happened.

Morvern's boyfriend has also left behind the manuscript for a novel on his computer along with a list of prospective publishers. Morvern substitutes her own name and mails it off. She never does call tell anyone about her boyfriend's suicide, choosing instead to dismember his body and bury it on the island on which her foster mother is also laid to rest. She then cleans out his bank account, using the funds to book a holiday in Spain for herself and Lanna.

No explicit reasons are ever given for many of the choices made in Morvern Callar. Morvern's decision to pale her name on the manuscript and to bury the body on her own may seem callous and immoral on the surface, but director Lynne Ramsey, working from Alan Warner's novel, never passes judgement on the character. Here is someone looking for escape be it through drugs, partying, or her headphones. The death of her boyfriend has a strangely liberating effect on her, even though all the while she keeps the tragedy repressed inside. In Spain, a chance encounter with a man whose mother has just died leads to emotional, cathartic sex; dealing with death, even in this oblique way, spurs her to leave the resort, hire a car, and explore the countryside, far away from the spring-break atmosphere of the hotel. She eventually returns to meet with interested book agents and attempts to discover more about both who she is and is going to become. How successful her escape from her life in Scotland will be is left up in the air; as Lanna says to her late in the film, "it's all the same out there." The film's final scene, a replay of an earlier bit in a club but now with a different soundtrack, ends the film on a thoughtful, melancholic note.

Morvern's journey is a largely interior one, and this can make the film at times difficult to penetrate. Ramsey's style, however, allows for significant emotional involvement if one surrenders to its spell. The movie has a druggy, at times almost hallucinatory feel to it. The party scenes at the beginning are frenetic and full of strong washes of color. The other scenes in Scotland, while not without their own beauty, are damp and certainly have a "morning after" feel to them. In contrast, the section of the film in Spain is brightly sunlit and, after Morvern and Lanna embark on their impromptu countryside tour, full of colors just as bold as any in the earlier party sequences.

Palm Pictures' DVD captures the theatrical look of the film very well (though the impact of many of the visuals are, naturally, even more striking on the big screen). Given Ramsey's background as a still photographer, it is no surprise that the film is so visually alive, and she has an excellent collaborator in cinematographer Alwin Kuchler. The disc's sound is robust and clear; the thickly accented dialogue is much easier to make out here than in theaters.

Samantha Morton's performance is a wonder of enigmatic expressiveness; Morvern may be opaque in many ways, but Morton makes sure that we are never lose interest in what is going on inside of her head. Kathleen McDermott may be a nonprofessional actor, but she is completely at ease with the camera and her relationship with Morvern feels genuine.

Extras, limited to brief interview snippets with the director and the two leads, are largely inconsequential. Trailers are included for this film as well as other Palm releases ranging from demonlover to their "Directors Series" collections of the work of video directors Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, and Chris Cunningham. While more information on the picture in question would have been appreciated, the film's the thing, and Palm's presentation of it is to be commended.