Ratcatcher

Ratcatcher (1999) is a British drama you can watch online on iFILM — the debut feature from Scottish director Lynne Ramsay, selected for Cannes. Glasgow, summer of 1973: a binmen's strike has left the tenements buried in rotting refuse. Twelve-year-old James is playing near the drainage canal when his friend Ryan drowns. Nobody saw it happen. James says nothing.

The guilt settles into him quietly, reshaping how he moves through a world that was already hard. His father drinks to get through the days. His mother holds the household together by force of will. James drifts between a gang of older boys, a short-sighted girl named Margaret Anne who keeps getting used by people who should know better, and the half-built houses on the city's edge — open fields, clean air, the only place that feels like a way out. William Eadie carries the film almost entirely without dialogue.

Ramsay shoots in images that stick: a mouse floating toward the moon, the smell of decay hanging over everything, a child's face that gives away nothing and everything at once. It is the kind of filmmaking that earns comparison to early Terrence Malick — not because it borrows his style, but because it trusts silence the same way. Stream Ratcatcher (1999) online on iFILM.