The vacant Samantha Morton is Morvern Callar, a Scottish slacker whose boyfriend, as the movie opens, has killed himself and left her with instructions to submit his novel to a publisher and use the money in his bank account to pay for his funeral. Instead, Morvern puts her name on the novel before she sends it off and uses the cash to take herself and her friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott, who’s the only thing in the movie that’s marginally entertaining) to a horrid “Youth Med” resort in Spain. She does a couple other horrifying things as well, but I won’t go into that. For no apparent reason, she drags Lanna away from the resort after a few days; they take a taxi to a small town and then, inexplicably, start walking along a deserted road, like, forever, until Morvern abandons her friend, hitches a ride to the beach, and meets up with the publishing company reps who just love “her” novel and want to pay her buckets of money.
I had a bad
feeling about the movie from the opening scenes, which were
of the boyfriend’s corpse and Morvern stroking it or just lying beside
it – every shot was oh-so-artistically arranged, and the camera
lingered
on the still life of the body and Morvern, with a fake Christmas tree
blinking
over them… it was just so precious and contrived. And then
Morvern
started talking to people, which was dreadful because you couldn’t
understand
a word anyone said, between their heavy accents and the deafening
background
noise and très hip soundtrack. Morton is a
complete
cipher, and a boring one at that. So the long shots of her blank
face don’t exactly communicate depth and complexity. Actually,
nothing
is really communicated by this opaque, impenetrable film, except maybe
that stealing from a dead person is fun and profitable.
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