Released 25 years ago, Ratcatcher featured two of the most striking debuts in British cinematic history. It’s rightly remembered as the first film by the writer-director Lynne Ramsay, the brilliant Glaswegian who went on to make Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin and You Were Never Really Here. And it was the acting debut of William Eadie, whose performance as James, a boy haunted by guilt and ground down by poverty, was vital to the success of an extraordinary work.
Set in a hideously run-down housing estate in Glasgow in 1973, it opens with a gorgeous slow-motion shot of another boy, Ryan, winding himself in his mother’s net curtains. Yet danger looms, as it does throughout the movie. Soon Ryan (Thomas
