Where to begin with Lynne Ramsay

The films open with arresting images out of context; scenes begin with close-ups of objects and characters’ body parts. Visual poetry, but a jagged, abstract kind, leaving the viewer to get their bearings as a sense of time and place only gradually emerges.

If the form of Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay’s pictures can be challenging, the content is only more so. Seeking psychological insight, often into loners who are in distress and out of step with the worlds they live in, Ramsay studies her subjects closely. Her films show us characters’ most intimate moments, and let us in on their private thoughts and feelings – of confused sexual urges, suicide ideation, hatred for (or indifference towards) kin, memories of violence given and received.

It’s in part because Ramsay’s films are this way – bracingly honest, and so uncompromisingly the director’s own – that there have been so few: in a career of nearly three decades, just five features and a handful of shorts (not to mention two famously aborted projects, The Lovely Bones and Jane Got a Gun, that Ramsay was let go from and exited, respectively, when her visions for both didn’t align with financiers). A small filmography, then, but a nonetheless formidable one.

For a filmmaker interested in erratic and harmful human behaviour and its causes, the mystery is not what happened, but why. From We Need to Talk About Kevin’s (2011) first scenes, fragmentary imagery and a discordant soundscape, led by Jonny Greenwood’s ominous score, point to a school shooting carried out by Kevin (Ezra Miller), the teen son of travel writer Eva (Tilda Swinton) and her husband Franklin (John C Reilly). Attempting to piece together something like a normal life following the attack, Eva thinks back on a deteriorating marriage and her combative relationship with a child she didn’t connect with, as she seeks to understand what might have led the latter to commit an atrocity.

A psychological study presented as a puzzle for the viewer to tackle, We Need to Talk About Kevin, though Ramsay’s most accessible film, still asks its audience to do some work: to keep up with a narrative where past and present flow together, as Eva’s memories flood her life post-shooting; to reach an understanding of and even find sympathy for two frequently challenging central characters, one a neglectful (and sometimes violent) mother, the other a murderer; and to ponder the age-old question of whether evil is born or made, without ever being offered any definitive answers from the film.

Figuratively and literally Ramsay’s punchiest film, the 90-minute revenge thriller You Were Never Really Here (2017) is Taken (2008) as imagined by a director concerned with the traumatising consequences of violence. You Were Never Really Here might have genre flavour – mercenary Joe (a hulking, tortured Joaquin Phoenix) is hired to rescue a senator’s daughter from a paedophile ring – but it’s certainly more spatially and temporally disorientating than your average revenger. Joe’s self-harm fantasies and memories of murder and abuse bleed into the narrative, while action scenes are either shockingly brief or have a syncopated rhythm, the film’s action by design bewildering and brutal but never exciting.

Ramsay lets just a touch more light in for her new film Die My Love (2025), which sees pregnant Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and her partner, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), leave the pressure of the city behind for the country – thus realising the dream of many a Ramsay protagonist – only to discover that dissatisfaction finds them there too. The film is shattering on postnatal depression, the sense of alienation and urge to self-harm that’s shared by many of Ramsay’s characters only intensified for Grace when she begins parenting, often alone, out in the isolated wilds of Montana. Amid the devastation, though, Die My Love also goes to some (darkly) comic places, Grace’s growing resentment escalating into screaming matches with Jackson and acerbic treatment for any smiling faces that cross her path.

Hollywood stars, glimpses under the hood of polite Middle America – such things are of a different planet from the one that Ramsay inhabited early in her career, when she was pegged as a British (more specifically Scottish) social realist, beginning with her first three short films.

In Small Deaths (1996) a girl grows into a young woman over three segments, each concerning a different kind of loss of innocence. In Kill the Day (1996) an addict steals to score, then tries to get clean following a stint in prison. In Gasman (1997) a girl discovers her father has a secret family during a Christmas outing to the local pub. Each is an accomplished snapshot of working-class life in Ramsay’s native Glasgow, a world which the director would go on to most fully explore in her feature debut, Ratcatcher (1999).

The image of a person submerged recurs throughout Ramsay’s films, with bodies of water in the director’s work alternately presented as tranquil and treacherous. In Ratcatcher, 12-year-old James (William Eadie) accidentally drowning his friend in the canal near his run-down housing estate is the catalyst for his desire to escape the city into the nearby countryside, a yearning which culminates in the single most ecstatic image in Ramsay’s filmography: James climbing through the open window of a half-finished new-build into a field of endless golden wheat, liberated.

Small-town Scotland is the starting point in Morvern Callar (2002), but the eponymous character (played by Samantha Morton) flees it for hedonistic pleasures in Spain following her boyfriend’s suicide, in what is Ramsay’s most moving work on loneliness and disconnection. Ramsay has frequently used the innocent sound of American pop and rock of the 50s and 60s to achingly contrast on-screen tragedy; in Morvern Callar, the track that lands the most devastating blow is The Mamas & the Papas’ emphatically romantic ‘Dedicated to the One I Love’, the song that Morvern hears playing – on a mixtape left to her by her boyfriend – as she dances alone in a nightclub full of people all dancing along to a different song.

Such is Ramsay’s individuality, even the director’s two expressly commercial projects bear her stamp. Made for high-fashion brand Miu Miu, Ramsay’s 30-minute documentary portrait of photographer Brigitte Lacombe, Brigitte (2019), is as much a portrait of the director, Ramsay filming Lacombe photographing Ramsay as the pair discuss eternal interests of Ramsay’s: girlhood experiences, relationship breakdowns and parenthood.

2012’s Swimmer, meanwhile, brings Ramsay back to the water, and to the feelings of serenity and awe it inspires in her work. One of four short films commissioned by the London Olympic Organising Committee to celebrate the 2012 games, Swimmer is nonetheless an auteurist work, a wordless drift through Britain’s waterways shot in high-contrast black and white and soundtracked by a sonic collage of music and soundbites from British New Wave films. Even here, Ramsay is distinctively expressive, even somewhat experimental.

Die My Love is in cinemas now, including BFI Southbank from 15 November.