DEATH BEGATS COMPLEX LIFE IN 'MORVERN CALLAR'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

THAT OLD ADAGE about women being unknowable gets an exhilarating new interpretation in ``Morvern Callar.'' The second feature film by Lynne Ramsay (``Ratcatcher'' was the first), ``Morvern'' extends and deepens the Scottish director's intuitive gift for depicting how surreal states of mind operate amid everyday reality.

Not that our title heroine, mysteriously and mesmerizingly played by Samantha Morton (``Minority Report,'' ``Sweet and Lowdown''), is sent on her journey of indefinable self-discovery by an everyday event. A supermarket drudge in a seaside Highlands town, the young woman comes home one Christmas Eve to discover her boyfriend's corpse beneath the blinking lights of their cheap holiday tree. He's unceremoniously taken his own life and left Morvern with such presents as a new jacket, a specially recorded mix tape (the tunes on which - by the Velvet Underground, Lee Hazlewood and various electronica entities - become our best guide to the inscrutable lass' inner emotional geography) and a novel he's just completed on the computer.

Following some heartrending caressing under the tree, Morvern seems to adjust, if that's what you'd call it. Donning the coat, plugging in the Walkman and taking some bills from dead boy's wallet (``Sorry,'' she tells him), Morvern heads out to meet their mates at the pub, then on to an all-night, sex-and-drugs house party. If anyone asks about her better half, Morvern doesn't exactly lie. ``He's gone away,'' she explains, adding ``for good.'' Sympathy is evoked, more ale and Ecstasy downed.

Soon after, Morvern withdraws the money her lover had saved for his funeral, replaces his name with hers on the manuscript, mails it off to a London publisher and dismembers the cadaver in their bathtub for easier, very private burial purposes. With the dough, she treats her best pal Lanna (Kathleen McDermott, a talented amateur as transparent and bubbly as Morton is slyly misdirecting) to a sunny vacation on a Eurotrash-infested Spanish coast.

There, while Lanna enjoys the same vigorous clubbing, anonymous coupling and idiot brain-cell demolishing they indulge back home, it emerges that Morvern is searching for a different kind of experience. She achieves something along these lines when those London publishers seek her out, brandishing fat cheques and praise for her literary genius.

So what is up with this girl? Is she the most coldhearted party monster on Earth? So devastated with grief that she's gone to some far, unknown region of denial? Just a working-class stiff who, quite practically, has the innate cunning to make the absolute best out of a dire situation?

Maybe she's just plain crazy. Or that, and all of the above. Or something else.

The electrifying magic of Morton's performance is the way she allows us to read multiple motives into each of Morvern's moves - or none at all. The girl displays intelligence, vulnerability, adorableness, compassion, all the civilized niceties to varying degrees; but what's most fascinating and captivating about her is the impression that she's always running on pure impulse. Pity her, hate her or think she's real cool, you've got to appreciate the elusive way she has of never acting in any manner you'd expect.

Ramsay, who adapted Alan Warner's source novel with Liana Dognini, rarely makes predictable moves, either. She and cinematographer Alwin H. Kuchler come up with original and disorienting lighting effects, indoors and out. The film's sound mix has a mind all its own. And the mad images Ramsay invents - many of them built around Morton's exposed flesh, a Bunuelian fascination with insects and the sterile settings in which mass consumption is supposed to be enjoyed - mark her as a true cinematic artist.

Ramsay even displays a sense of humor about that whole impenetrable dialect thing that made nine-tenths of ``Ratcatcher'' unintelligible, as Morvern's ridiculous name repeatedly has to be spelled out, even to her fellow Scots. If that isn't real artistic growth, nothing is.

MORVERN CALLAR - Three and one half stars

(Not rated: nudity, sex, drug use, language, suicide)

Starring: Samantha Morton, Kathleen McDermott.

Director: Lynne Ramsay.

Running time: 1 hr. 37 min.

Playing: Nuart, West L.A.; University 6, Irvine.

In a nutshell: Utterly mysterious yet hiding nothing, Morton's performance as a young Scottish woman coping - or maybe not - with her boyfriend's suicide is one of the most intriguing characterizations of the year.

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After her boyfriend's suicide, Morvern (Samantha Morton, right) and best friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott) leave Scotland.