What Morvern Callar Has to Teach Us About Empathy

Words: Arianna Caserta

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In 2002 British director Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, We Need to Talk About Kevin) chose to adapt Alan Warner's novel Morvern Callar into a noir-tinged film starring actress Samantha Morton. Alienating — but in a strange way, extremely human — the film tells the story of the fictional Morvern Callar, a young woman living in the Scottish highlands who discovers the lifeless body of her partner after he committed suicide on Christmas Day. As a testament, her boyfriend leaves a note written just before the tragic event, asking Morvern to submit a novel he wrote (and left in his computer) to a publishing house, so it can be published posthumously. 

Along with the novel, Morvern’s boyfriend also leaves a mixtape made of songs for her to listen to after his death. Refusing to be reduced to a mere token in her partner's purposefully designed plan, the girl decides to hide the corpse and take credit for the manuscript. She can finally begin a new life away from the seedy supermarket where she works; away from the gloomy atmosphere of a society where she always felt relegated to a bleak grey area.

Narrated through haunting close-ups of the protagonist's hallucinated gaze, to this day Lynne Ramsey's Morvern Callar is one of the most peculiar and unclassifiable female-driven cinematic narratives ever told in cinema. In the niche of arthouse film lovers, Morvern Callar is incredibly loved and praised — outside of it, her glacial remorseless acts and effortless style are still underrated. While she lacks a place in the mainstream canon, the titular Morvern has a lesson to teach us all still, stemming from the fact that taking credit for the novel written by her dead boyfriend was never actually a bad idea. 

“Let’s face it: who is Morvern Callar, really? She’s a young woman, delegated to return every day to a monotonous workplace, locked in a relationship…”

___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Let’s face it: who is Morvern Callar, really? She’s a young woman, delegated to return every day to a monotonous workplace, locked in a relationship with a boy about whom we only know three things: he’s an aspiring writer, he has a musical taste that revolves around psychedelic music and 90s selections from Warp Records, and he cheated on Morvern with her friend and co-worker Lanna. With her partner committed to embodying the tormented artist role, Morvern probably never felt like the main character of her own life. Even in dying, her boyfriend uses their relationship as a means to make his presence survive after death. He dedicates his novel to her, wants her to publish it, and desires to turn her into the grieving widow who mediates between a dead fiancé and his posthumous fame. And not only that — the mixtape her boyfriend dedicates to Morvern, apparently just a sweet way to stay in her thoughts - is an attempt at trying to control her emotions, suggesting what should be the soundtrack of her grieving. 

Exactly because of these reasons and her following actions, Morvern breaks every trope of the widow: of grief, of empathy, of justice. Morvern is cold, calculating, apathetic, but in what looks like a race away from grief, she’s actually finding a way to end her pain. Morvern’s decisions are a silent revenge from a woman relegated to the shadows of her narcissistic boyfriend. 

Acting like someone who could be described as a cold-hearted monster with no mercy, Morvern is an antagonist to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype. If a MPDM - the most common way women get portrayed his films, still nowadays - corresponds to a quirky and lighthearted woman who onlys serves the purpose of accompanying the male protagonist towards his own goals, Morvern is the exact opposite: her boyfriend’s immediate death (Lynne Ramsay leaves no screentime for him in the movie, not even for his ghost) triggers in Morvern a detached selfishness, while his posthumous goals become a weapon for her to gain herself back.

In an ocean of female representations driven by the constrictions of male gaze, Morvern Callar creates a new archetype. She steals the place from her masters to become - finally - the main character of her own plot. Morvern transforms the void left by her lover in the most powerful field of action: she’s not a tool anymore, but the final point. Should we all go back to Lynne Ramsay’s 2002 movie to find in it the hero we were all waiting for? And how does the image of a girl chopping up her dead boyfriend's corpse in the bathroom make us feel today? 

In contemporary times ruled by the internet's dynamics, where everybody expresses their opinions in black and white within every online discourse, art is often encouraged to kill all controversy and retreat into stereotypes: we know exactly who we should root for or empathise with, and who we should just condemn instead. On the contrary, Lynne Ramsay’s story of rebellion disguised as a dark tale only hints at its subversive charge, leaving space for critical nuance and inviting us to empathise with Morvern for much more than what we see happening on the screen.