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The Scottish film-maker Lynne Ramsay unveils her latest dark creation

- INTERVIEW By Amy Raphael PORTRAITS Antonio Olmos

Several years ago, Martin Scorsese read Die, My Love in his book club.

The novel, by Argentinian author Ariana Harwicz, follows an unnamed woman who moves with her husband to the middle of nowhere in France.

Isolated and frustrated, she battles the confines of marriage and motherhood. She introduces herself to the reader as "a nutcase", as "someone beyond repair". She sets fire to ants, swears at her child, complains of its "constant clucking and grousing". She speaks the unspeakable: "I'm a mother, full stop. And I regret it, but I can't even say that." Scorsese sent the novel to Jennifer Lawrence's production company. He was convinced that Lawrence could and must play the mother. In turn, Lawrence and her producing partner, Justine Ciarrocchi, only ever had one film-maker in mind: Lynne Ramsay, the Scottish director who has exhibited a preoccupation with the dark side of parental responsibility and family dynamics throughout her career.

On its release in 1999, Ramsay's first film, Ratcatcher, won rave reviews and comparisons to the social realism of Ken Loach and Terence Davies. An unflinching excavation of how truth and fantasy blur for a 12-year-old boy after he accidentally drowns another boy in a Glasgow canal during the bin strikes of 1973, it remains one of the greatest debuts in UK film.

Ramsay went global with her third feature, 2011's We Need to Talk About Kevin. Adapted from Lionel Shriver's novel, the film imagines the terrible result of a failure to connect with your child. In this instance, the teenager commits a Columbine-style massacre but can't be tried as an adult. The blame is thus directed at his mother, Eva - played memorably by Tilda Swinton - who suffered from postpartum depression. When baby Kevin refused to sleep, she told him that "Mommy was happy before Kevin came along".