‘Morvern Callar’ Paints A Devastating Portrait Of Grief Through Its Artfully Crafted Soundtrack

Lynne Ramsay’s 2002 film Morvern Callar, an adaptation of the novel by Scottish author Alan Warner that’s now streaming on Amazon Prime, opens with unsettling silence as the title character awakens to find that her boyfriend has killed himself. The scene is slow and eerily quiet – it’s mostly just Samantha Morton lying still on the floor and overcome with numbness as the initial shock wears off. All focus is placed on the details of her environment – the buzzes and incidental sounds that fill in the silence, the warm flickering glow of a Christmas tree. It’s the sort of essentially meaningless details that become quite vivid when you recall a traumatic moment in retrospect. The scene immediately sets the tone for a film that’s as much about grief as it is about sound and color filling up a sudden void.

The music doesn’t come in for a little while. Most of what you hear in the movie is from a mix tape that Morvern’s boyfriend has left for her along with a novel that he’s dedicated to her that he instructs her to have published posthumously. The plot of the film follows what happens when she disposes of his body and gets the book published as her own work, but the emphasis of the movie is mainly on the way his presence haunts her through the music, and the lingering numbness she feels as she attempts to carry on, find a new life, and have fun.

It’s never clear whether or not Morvern even likes the music on the mix, or if she’s only just listening to it to keep a part of him with her. Her boyfriend has excellent taste – you get multiple songs by Can and Aphex Twin, plus Stereolab, Broadcast, Lee “Scratch” Perry, and Boards of Canada. It’s all very particular to a specific type of late ’90s pretentious white guy, and in some way, the contents are a loving parody of that sort of guy.

Even still, it all sounds amazing, especially when paired with Ramsay’s dreamy, artfully edited visuals. The music often feels surreal in the context of so much silence, and particular sounds like Can’s hyper-saturated synthesizers and Stereolab’s pulsing piano are as stark a contrast with Morvern’s drab surroundings in northern Scotland as the harsh desert sunlight and disorienting club lights she encounters later in the film. Most of the songs are atmospheric, but the more lyric-driven selections land with bitter irony. The film’s most gruesome scene is set to Velvet Underground’s cutesy “I’m Sticking with You” – the title gets upsettingly literal – and it all ends with The Mamas and the Papas’ “Dedicated to the One I Love” as a dark punchline playing out over the credits.

It helps to love the music in Morvern Callar, but it’s not entirely dependent on the viewer’s taste for artsy electronic music and thoughtfully recontextualized ’60s pop. Samantha Morton’s performance is stunning, and Ramsay’s camera observes her every movement with the platonic equivalent of how Jean-Luc Godard’s mad love for Anna Karina is obvious in every frame he ever shot of her in the early ‘60s. The camera doesn’t quite ogle Morton’s body, but it lingers on her as if trying to make sense of everything that’s beautiful and strange about her. Morton portrays Morvern as a complex and nuanced person prone to rash decisions brought on by suppressed anger, but Ramsay and cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler view her from a distance as fascinating and inscrutable. The movie presents her as a code to be cracked, but by the end it’s clear that Morvern herself isn’t quite sure who she is either. If anything, you leave with a better sense of the guy who made the mix tape.

Matthew Perpetua is the writer of Fluxblog.org, the internet’s oldest continuously running music blog.

Where to stream Morvern Callar