You could think of it as a story about gifts, and what people do with them. When James dies, he leaves behind not just a suicide note, but a full novel - along with detailed instructions on how Morvern (Samantha Morton) should try to sell it. He also, thoughtfully, leaves money for his own funeral, but Morvern plunders his bank account to buy a holiday for herself and best friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott). This gift is reciprocated with the kind of bitterness that often comes when friends travel together. And the gift she gives herself - stripping James' name from the novel and putting her own in its place - winds up revealing only the emptiness deep inside her. Despite the ironic turn of good fortune that sets the most exciting events in her life in motion, Morvern Callar herself remains full of misunderstanding and longing.

I haven't seen director Lynne Ramsay's previous Ratcatcher, but Morvern Callar lives up to that film's gritty reputation. Even the requisite scenes of Morton, adrift on the club scene, her face illuminated by flashing lights and soundtracked to a thumping beat, have a plain, unforced quality to them. Nothing in Morvern Callar is as flashy, or as straightforward, as you might expect.

That's not to say it feels fresh and new, either. Forward narrative momentum is sacrificed in the name of mood and characterization, and even at its bare 97-minute running time, the film starts to feel distended. But there are enough moments of invention and even humor along the way to carry you along. I found it to be quite a pleasurable thing to settle in to watch a movie about a poor Scottish girl and her dead boyfriend and wind up, midway through, in a red-pepper-bedecked livery cab blocking up a religious procession, complete with Jesus statues and el toro, somewhere in the Almeria province of Spain.

Morton's co-star, Kathleen McDermott, is a fine, naturalistic actress making, according to the Internet Movie Database, her film debut. Her role isn't particularly flashy, but this film can't afford to let anyone strike a false note, and she never does. As Lanna, she is more bubbly and demonstrative than her companion could ever be, representing the connections with the rest of the world that Morvern seems unable quite to make.

But Morvern Callar is concerned with very little but the character of Morvern Callar herself, a supermarket clerk whose life is lived paycheck to paycheck and offers precious little of meaning - and few clues that she would be capable of perpetrating the scam she attempts to pull off here. Callar is a well-intentioned nobody, with few distinguishing characteristics save her odd first name. (When she picks up a ringing pay phone on the street, she winds up spelling it for the anonymous fellow on the other end of the line:: "M, O, R, V ...")

Morton plays her with the impressive lack of self-consciousness that has become her trademark. With a round face and big, searching eyes, Morton is the center of attention in most every shot. She begins the film as a despairing waif of a girl, cuddling up to her bleeding lover on the floor for a last repose. As the film progresses, she grows infinitely more worldly, and more sexual -- her thong sticks out of her jeans as she packs her bags for a journey -- full of no-nonsense confidence and earthiness. Though the story feels a little slim, Morton's performance is a great one. She carries the film beyond its modest production, giving delicate and credible nuance to a women that could easily have come across as a cipher, or merely as an opportunist. Instead, it's only once she gets what she seems to want, that we - and perhaps she - realize how lost she really is. As character studies go, Morvern Callar may seem slight, but Morton makes it haunting.