Edinburgh Napier University

  Lynne Ramsay has been called one of the most distinctive British filmmakers of her generation, yet despite her renown as a director she rarely receives attention nor credit for her mastery of screenwriting technique. Her early short films demonstrated superlative skills in characterisation, emotional intelligence and psychological realism, which she continued with her masterfully minimalist debut feature Ratcatcher (1999), crafting screen works with the verisimilitude of Ken Loach or the Dardennes brothers shot through with a bleak lyrical beauty.

What makes her screenwriting particularly interesting, however, is how in each of her subsequent films she has demonstrated the will and the skill to move beyond the restrictive doxa laid out by screenwriting manuals and recited ad nauseum within screen industries, subverting key conventions in striking ways, and demonstrating a broad palette of technique. In Morvern Callar (2002), she presented the rarest of things: a female ‘defection protagonist’ (Menne, 2019), a lost wanderer lacking the wilfulness of the typical Hollywood protagonist, evoking Agnes Varda’s Vagabond (1985) and the counter-culture approaches of the Hollywood New Wave. In We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011) she crafted a complex modular narrative, interweaving three separate discontiguous timelines in the protagonist’s life, reflecting the fracturing of the psyche in the aftermath of severe trauma, and presenting a ‘puzzle film’ (Buckland, 2009) narrative every bit as skilfully crafted as Memento (2000) or Mulholland Drive (2001) but with a deeper emotional resonance. In her most recent feature, You Were Never Really Here (2017), she presents a Travis Bickle-esque changeless protagonist, locked inside his own emotional and psychological struggles, who does not change but is ‘revealed’ (Schrader, 2002), whilst managing still to drive a suspense-laden crime narrative.

This video-essay analyses the screenwriting techniques that Ramsay has used throughout her career to create her distinctive cinema, revealing the conventions she has sought to challenge and the manner in which she has challenged them.