Small Deaths (1996) Reviews

• Ramsay's first

  darren shan2004-12-12

  Promising short feature, made by Lynne Ramsay as her graduation movie from film school. It covers 3 events in a girl's life. The first shows her as a very young girl watching her father get ready to go out for a night. In the second segment she's a teenager who witnesses a nasty incidence involving a cow. While in the third she's a young adult who goes to a creepy building with her boyfriend. He goes upstairs, leaving her to fidget nervously below. But then he calls to her ... Dark, intimate snippets of everyday life, lovingly captured. An impressive debut by the director of Ratcatcher. This immediately establishes the mood, focus and ambition of her later work. It won a prize at Cannes.

• Pretty decent start for Ramsay

  Horst_In_Translation2016-07-29

  "Small Deaths" is an 11-minute live action short film from 1996, so it has its 20th anniversary this year. The writer and director is Lynne Ramsay and she won at the prestigious Cannes Film festival for her rookie work here. An impressive achievement. Actually, it is really 3 films in one, 3 very short films, as this movie tells us the story of a girl and 3 events that happened to her when she was young and how these events stayed memorable to her, probably in a negative way. The girls at different ages are of course also played by different actors, one of them being Ramsay's daughter. All in all, I would say that the filmmaker made a nice impact here and this is better than what most other filmmakers did early on, a respectable achievement for somebody in their 20s. Ramsay also proves here that she is probably at her best when she focuses on the female psyche and fittingly the protagonists are still very young here and grew older with Ramsay growing older. I recommend you to check it out.

• Deaths Used in a Personal Sense

  Hitchcoc2019-04-29

  The director uses a young girl viewing events in her life. They are from mundane to cruel. All three are painful in some way--sad or melancholy. One is quite violent. These are just slice of life kinds of things, showing us the harsh realities of every day life. A filmmaker feeling her way along.