William Eadie

James does not explain himself for our benefit. In Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher (1999), William Eadie plays the boy with a reserve that leaves us watching his expression and gestures rather than waiting for a speech. He has guilt to carry, but he still has the ordinary curiosity of a child. That is what makes the performance so good: the boy has more going on than the trouble at the centre of the story.

Eadie was a non-professional child performer when Ramsay cast him as the lead in her debut feature. The film’s Glasgow setting, during the bin strikes of the 1970s, gives James a deprived place to grow up without making poverty his only characteristic. Ramsay trusts him with the film’s child-centred view, and he does not make James implausibly articulate simply to help us understand him. We do not need every response explained, though the film sometimes leaves its relationships too thinly drawn.

His scenes with Leanne Mullen’s Margaret Anne and John Miller’s Kenny matter just as much as that reserve. The children’s company is unpredictable, and the humour never feels arranged to give us a break from the squalor. We were moved by the film’s moments of physical affection, because there is so little else here to make life bearable. Eadie belongs in that company; the performance works partly because it does not keep asking us to notice the lead actor.

The credits that followed include a minor appearance in 3-D Halloween (2000) and the role of the son in the short Letter to an Unknown Son (2009). They do not amount to a sustained acting career, and we cannot use one substantial role to describe a habit repeated across decades. Nor does the lack of a longer filmography diminish what Eadie does here. Give Ratcatcher a quiet evening rather than a distracted one.