Set in the mid '70s in a Glasgow housing project, Ratcatcher is about a river (true, it is more of a canal, but it moves and meanders with the attitude of an old river) and the children it kills. Though the movie's title suggests that it has something to do with catching rats, and we do see lots of rats running about the garbage littering the front lawns of the housing projects (the garbage collectors are on strike), these rats do not address the film's main agenda, which is the death of children. That is the province of the river.

The sinister river is black, polluted, and waits impatiently for boys and girls to fall into its murky depths. At the very start of Ratcatcher, the river claims its first life, a boy named Brian who is pushed into the river by the movie's hero, James (William Eadie). When Brian's limp body is dumped on the river's bank, it appears so pale that it seems the river has deliberately sucked out, vampire-wise, the boy's life energy. Later, James is almost thrown into the river by local bullies. At that terrible moment, as he's swung back and forth to build momentum for the final throw, one sees how eager and ready the river is to snuff him out. But James is spared and makes it back home alive.

In another scene, James' father (Tommy Flanagan) is awakened from a drunken sleep by his crazed wife (Mandy Matthews), who tells him that the river is trying to kill another child. James' father bolts out of the apartment building, dashes into the river, and pulls the boy out of the abyss. The boy is revived, and James' father receives an award for heroism from the city council. But at the end of the film, after numerous attempts, the river is successful--it claims yet another little life, the life of the story, as it were.

After watching Ratcatcher, I started thinking about a friend of mine, Karl Young-Maze, who died when he was only 13. He was killed by a contaminated lake (Hourglass Lake) in Sharptown, Maryland. Seeing that I'm now 32, and have outlived Karl by almost 20 years, what I wanted to figure out is this: Is the death I'm to encounter sometime in the future as a full adult better or worse than Karl's early death? As I failed to come up with an answer after I watched Ratcatcher last week, I have decided to use the remainder of this review to answer this all-important question.

Now, according to Ratcatcher, the life of a boy--which is composed of extreme angles, close-ups, funny filters, jump cuts--is vertiginous, unstable, and colorful. Nothing has come together yet; the world is full of wonder, magic, and brilliant things. In fact, some scenes in Ratcatcher abandon reality entirely, such as the moment when a boy ties a rat to a birthday balloon and watches as it floats up to the sky, through outer space, and lands on the moon, where it eagerly joins other rats who are frantically running about its desiccated surface.

What all of this implies is that to die in the world of Ratcatcher, a child's world, is to die in a dream and not in the real world. An adult death, by contrast, is a heavy death--a death that wipes out a large collection of memories, which, over the years, have been carefully arranged and infused with meaning by the adult. The death of a boy is the very opposite; it is an airy death, a death as substantial (and meaningful) as the rays of sunlight or a soft breeze.

Now to answer the question of which death is better: Clearly, a child's death is better, because children die within a dream, meaning they die within the truth and not within the illusion of reality. To die within reality, on the other hand, is to die outside of the truth, outside of the knowledge that life "is but a dream." But then this presents a new problem: Why do little deaths cause us more grief than grownup deaths, which, as we have seen, are the more unfortunate of the two? Maybe Lynne Ramsay's next film will inspire an answer to this difficult question.