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Morvern Callar

Morvern Callar (Samantha Morton) listens to the mix tape her boyfriend made for her.

FILM FACTS

Starring: Samantha Morton and Kathleen McDermott
Director: Lynne Ramsay
Rating: Not rated but contains sex, nudity, strong language and drug use
Genre: Drama

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See showtimes (Not Rated) 97 minutes

Grade: A-

Verdict: Though often as inscrutable as its title, it'll stay with you like a song you can't get out of your head.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The corpse under the Christmas tree is our first clue that "Morvern Callar" isn't your typical summer movie. That and the affectless, unfathomable gaze of Samantha Morton, an actress whose unusual quality has already gotten her cast as Sean Penn's mute lover in "Sweet and Lowdown" and a psychic water baby in "Minority Report."

Morton plays the oddly named title character, a low-paid grocery clerk in a Scottish coastal town. It's her boyriend lying beneath the blinking Christmas lights. He's left her an online suicide note -- "Don't try to understand. It just felt like the right thing to do" -- and a request that she send the manuscript of his just-finished novel to particular publishers.

What does Morvern do? She goes to a local club with her giggly pal, Lanna (Kathleen McDermott), gets drunk, gets high and gets in bed with a total stranger. Back home, she calmly deletes her late boyfriend's name from his book, replaces it with her own and mails it to the first publisher on the list. Finally, as he's asked, she empties his bank account, takes his credit card and goes vacationing in Spain with Lanna.

After cutting up the body into little pieces and burying it, of course.

What are we to make of Morvern? That's the plot of this strangely enthralling movie -- a character study of a young woman who's almost impossible to comprehend. Some part of Morvern always seems somewhere else. She's not entirely disengaged; when clubbing with Lanna, she gets girlishly giddy, hopping up and down like a teenager before a Justin Timberlake concert. The closest we get to getting inside her head is probably through the playlist of songs on her boyfriend's final Christmas present, a tape titled "Music for You" (the artists range from Velvet Underground to Aphex Twin).

On their oddball odyssey to Spain, where they stay in one of those gleaming resort hotels and take part in ludicrous poolside games, Morvern never completely lets herself go in the way bubbly, bubble-brained Lanna does. (McDermott, who is wonderful, is a barber trainee who's never acted before.) It's as if she's as baffled as we are by what she's doing.

Morton's total immersion in the role is astonishing. She gives Morvern a dreamy, distant quality combined with a subtle, fierce intensity. Morvern may, indeed, be a little girl lost, but she never loses her insistent sense of privacy, her prideful woundedness.

"Morvern Callar" is directed by Lynne Ramsay, whose 1999 debut film, "Ratcatcher," was remarkable. Ramsay shares David Lynch's affinity for surreal supermarkets and indefinable outsiders. She's as fascinated by the enigma of personality as she is by the social detritus of the young and the restless.

For most moviegoers, Ramsay is still an unknown, but that's going to change. She's just signed to direct the movie version of Alice Sebold's prize-winning novel, "The Lovely Bones." Her unique vision, combined with Morton's brave, disorienting performance, makes "Morvern Callar" a mesmerizing conundrum of a suspended life in perpetual motion.