He is playing, but the curtain also seems to engulf him. Suddenly his mother comes from offscreen and gives him a slap. We are back in the real world, and we follow this boy as he steals away to play with a friend in the fetid canal behind his house. The story takes place during a garbage strike in the 1960s. Plastic bags filled with trash litter the neighborhood of run down tenements.
Rats are everywhere.
James' father is a pathetic drunk with little warmth towards his son. His weary-eyed mother shows affection to her three children, although the demands of life are too much for her. Ramsay is careful to depict the good moments as well as the bad - this is a poor struggling family like many others. But the brutal conditions, the squalor and ignorance, make it hard for anyone to do much more than try to survive, day by day. Ratcatcher focuses on the ways James tries to break free, if only in his mind.