While watching this fascinating coming-of-age drama set in urban Scotland during the mid-'70s, you can't help but flash on BILLY ELLIOT. But despite many shared parallels, RATCATCHER is much less a feel-good, you-go-boy movie, more an extremely sensitive, sometimes brutally realistic portrayal of a lad with a secret and how he ultimately comes to terms with it. It's a deeper, more emotionally complex film, blessed with a languid tempo and a plethora of symbolic images sure to inspire rumination for weeks to come.

Twelve-year-old James (William Eadie) is living in a Glasgow slum during a months-long garbage strike. The rats are the only ones faring well during this bleak summer, captured in a dark documentary style in which the camera lingers long on surfaces, expressions, symbols. James' Da (Tommy Flanagan) is an unemployed alcoholic whose only use for his son is to fetch beer; his Ma (Mandy Matthews) is the resigned Al-Anon who loves her family but is hamstrung by her hardscrabble existence. The kids play, vent their anger, and even eat lunch in the stinking rubbish heaps.

[plot spoiler] One day while James swims with his friend Ryan in the canal, they play too rough and the boy drowns. As James battles his guilt, we watch the trash bags pile up, the vermin proliferate, and the boy become keenly aligned with the bleakness of his surroundings. We witness all the usual cruelty of childhood-the taunts, bullying, put-downs-but seen through this guilt-wracked boy's eyes, they become almost as unbearable as his growing alienation from himself and his family. Accents are brick thick, but the film thoughtfully provides English subtitles so you can differentiate `p**s off' from `w**k off' from `fook off.'

But even in this wretched environment, small bits of love do surface, breaking ground like flowers through cement walkways. James meets the awkwardly flirtatious Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen),another sensitive soul, who seeks the local boys' approval by gang-banging them. The pair bond around their respective wounds, and while bubble-bathing with Margaret, James laughs for the only time during the film.

The boy also forms a tentative bond with innocent Kenny (John Miller),dubbed `the wee spastic b***ard' by the other kids because of his extreme love of animals, speech impediment, and some general squirliness that's hard to diagnose. He may be the village naif, but he ultimately discerns the truth of James' situation-and James the truth of his-and both confront each other in ways that allow them to accept reality. Kenny launches the film's most amazing image: a white mouse tied to a moon-bound helium balloon.

James becomes keenly aware of the squalor he lives in as he watches his `half-cut' father, drunk to drooling, slur `I love you' to Ma while Tom Jones rocks the Beeb. But his redemption dream comes in the guise of a new house that a city agency has promised the family. In several beautifully transcendent scenes, James rides the bus to the end of the line, where a spate of such new homes are under construction. He tumbles through the big open field before them, takes a whiz in a brand-new toilet, and absorbed in revelry, kicks a can all the way home.

Driven purely by images and emotional content, RATCATCHER is an auspicious debut by Glaswegian writer/director Lynne Ramsay, whose sensitive eye reminds us how truly excruciating childhood's tortures can be. It's a thoroughly outstanding production, from Rachel Portman's minimalist score to the wonderfully slow pacing to memorable performances by a cast of mostly newcomers.

Bravo.

This is the most beguiling British film about childhood since Kes (1969),a slowburning look at days in the life of a small boy on the brink of adolescence. He has adolescent encounters, including an uneasy bath with an unpopular older girl, but he's very much a pre-adolescent child, with all the helplessness and vulnerability that that means. Lynne Ramsay's great strength as a filmmaker is an ability to recreate the world as seen through her characters' eyes. From with the deprivation, the film is set on a housing estate during a binman's strike, she finds moments of real beauty - a joyfully filmed tumble in a hayfield - and strikingly surreal moments, such as a backward boy's pet mouse flying to the moon on a balloon. If Ratcatcher has a forerunner, excepting Ramsay's own award-winning shorts, it is not The Bill Douglas Trilogy, a semi-still life of a Scottish slum boy, which it eclipses completely, but the great hand-crafted films of Lindsay Anderson: This Sporting Life; If..., and O Lucky Man!

I saw this movie recently at a special Student premiere in Leicester Square in London. I'd read a few reviews from various magazines about the movie and its lack of Narrative structure, but from watching the first 5 minutes, I knew this was something special. This has to be one of the most powerful British Movies ever made. The acting is superb, the whole cast is brilliant especially the children. Lynn Ramsey directs her feature debut with confidence and professional ability, and the result is stunning. The Narrative does give way slightly after the "accident" and the movie seems to forget about that fateful day on the canal, it seems to drift a little, but this, as I found out afterwards was on purpose. The movie was originally envisaged as 20 short stories which came into one, and it was also designed so the audience would always have this event in the back of their minds throughout the movie and whenever something relevant happened you were instantly reminded of it. Their are a few minor controversial scenes in the movie which some members of the audience did not agree with and others simply laughed off - I was not bothered about the main controversial scene but could see and hear that some people were offended. The setting of Glasgow in the late 1970s is well represented, and set around the dustbin men strike of '76. The atmosphere of living in a disease ridden place like this with rubbish piling up on every corner is almost tangible. The balance between bleakness and humour is never crossed too far either side. The subject matter is very depressing and humour was therefore injected in places (such as the rat on the moon sequence) to lighten up the audience and not have them leaving the cinema depressed.

This movie is a real stunner, don't be fooled by reviews and magazines saying otherwise go and see this movie at the first possible chance. You will not be disappointed.