20 Essential Coming Of Age Movies That Changed Your Life

9. Ratcatcher

Sometimes life doesn't deliver the clear-cut happy ending we're often familiar with from films. Lynne Ramsay's extraordinary directorial debut, Ratcatcher, is a film far less concerned with rose-tinted romanticizing than it is with exploring the raw, often harsh truths of emerging from childhood into the adult world. James Gillespie (William Eadie) lives on a run-down 1970s Glaswegian housing estate in the process of being torn down, a squalor only worsened by a strike by bin men, with mounds of rubbish lining the streets. Opening with a stirring scene in which his friend drowns in the nearby canal, it's tempting to assume that we're deep within the territory of miserablist social realism in the vein of Ken Loach. But Ramsay wrong-foots the audience to some degree, and Ratcatcher offers moments of poetic transcendence mirroring James's own flights of fantasy as he escapes his downtrodden life, and if the final realisation is that physical escape from the world he lives in is unattainable, it's delivered with haunting resonance.