Lynne Ramsay is GFT's latest CineMaster

Over the next few weeks Glasgow Film Theatre is going to be chockablock with fantastic filmmakers, what with the Glasgow Film Festival taking over the cinema between 21 February and 4 March. The work of one of these cinemasters will be hanging around, however.

Lynne Ramsay: CineMaster

One of the hottest tickets at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival is Lynne Ramsay’s latest You Were Never Really Here, a brutal thriller in which Joaquin Phoenix plays a hammer-wielding vigilante hired to save a kidnapped girl from a child sex ring. The Glaswegian filmmaker will be back on her old stomping ground to introduce the screenings and take part in a Q&A. Chances are this new thriller will whet your appetite to dive further into Ramsay’s intense, sensory worlds, and the Glasgow Film Theatre are permitting you to do just that with a retrospective of Ramsay’s past films screening throughout March.

Ramsay is hardly prolific, so while the GFT’s Ramsay: Cinemaster series only consists of three films – Ratcatcher (1999), Morvern Callar (2002) and We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) – it represents a full retrospective of Glaswegian filmmaker’s feature work. This output may be small, but it packs a mighty punch.

Ratcatcher (1999)

Ramsay exploded on to the UK film scene in the late 90s with the lyrical Ratcatcher. Like her early short films Small Deaths and Gasman, it’s an earthy and evocative depiction of a Glasgow childhood. Set in the late 1970s around the overgrown waste grounds and rundown tenements of Maryhill, the film is told from the limited point of view of a sensitive 12-year-old boy seeking respite from his oppressive home life and the terrible guilt he feels about an incident that happened down in the squalid canal near his home. Ramsay never shies away from the grim realities of poverty, but Ratcatcher is also a film full of beautiful imagery and imaginative compositions.

Her next film was a dazzling adaptation of Alan Warner's novel Morvern Callar, beginning with the young woman of the title waking up on Christmas Day to find the body of her novelist boyfriend – who’s cut his own throat – under the tree among the presents. What follows is one of the most beguiling studies of grief ever put on screen. Samantha Morton stars as the emotionally damaged woman, and Ramsay pulls us close as we follow her strange and grisly movements as she tries to cope with her boyfriend’s suicide in her own disturbing way.

Ramsay’s next film was another adaptation of a disquieting novel – We Need to Talk About Kevin – but her approach was more playful this time around, adding in baroque elements of horror and an expressive use of colour to the story of a woman realising that her son might be a monster. Tilda Swinton plays the mother while Ezra Miller plays her smirking, dead-eyed progeny. The horror is balanced by a wicked sense of humour, making this the finest black comedy about the mother/son filial bond since Psycho.

Ingmar Bergman: CineMaster

The Seventh Seal (1957)

Such is the paucity of Ramsay’s output – you could watch everything she’s made in an afternoon – the GFT can squeeze another CineMasters programme into March, and they’ve chosen to pair her with a filmmaker with a similar knack for putting us inside their character’s psyche: Ingmar Bergman.

Five films from the great Swedish filmmaker are screening, and the line-up sees a pleasing mix of some familiar Bergman films with a couple of outliers of his oeuvre. So as well as showing three stone-cold masterpieces – The Seventh Seal (1967), Wild Strawberries (1957) and Persona (1966) – GFT are also screening 1971 effort The Touch, Bergman’s first film in English, with the director’s regulars Bibi Andersson and Max von Sydow joined by Elliott Gould at his most subtle and dashing. While it may not have the emotional intensity of Persona or the visual invention of The Seventh Seal, The Touch is still a deliciously complex study of human emotions, and a must watch on the big screen given its rarity.

The other unusual late Bergman in the mix is his 1975 take on Mozart’s The Magic Flute, which might represent the famously dour Swede at his most exuberant. If you’re intimidated by either opera or Bergman, this is a joyous gateway drug to both.

Ingmar Bergman and Lynne Ramsay CineMasters dates in full:

Ingmar Bergman: CineMaster
The Seventh Seal – Sun 11 Mar
Wild Strawberries – Sun 18 Mar
Persona – Sun 25 Mar
The Touch – Sun 1 Apr
The Magic Flute – Sun 8 Apr

Lynne Ramsay: CineMaster
Ratcatcher – Mon 12 Mar
Morvern Callar – Mon 19 Mar 
We Need to Talk About Kevin – Mon 26 Mar

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For more details and tickets, head to glasgowfilm.org