[1][2] Her parents introduced her to movies at an early age through the work of Bette Davis, Nicolas Roeg, Alfred Hitchcock, and Michael Curtiz.

[5] Gasman (1998), also written and directed by Ramsay, is about a brother and sister who attend a Christmas party with their father, and encounter two other children who are strangely familiar with him.

[3] Ratcatcher is set in Maryhill, Glasgow during the binmen's strike of the 1970s and follows James (William Eadie), the child of a struggling working-class family.

The film follows a young girl (Samantha Morton) adrift in Europe following the suicide of her boyfriend, which she doesn't report to the police.

[11] In 2001, it was announced Ramsay was slated to direct the adaptation of Alice Sebolds The Lovely Bones, which she had read in a manuscript form prior to its publication.

The film, based on Lionel Shriver's novel, is about a mother (Tilda Swinton) dealing with the aftermath of a school massacre committed by her own son (Ezra Miller).

[13] Starting in 2011, Ramsay was sharing plans to direct a modern science-fiction adaptation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick called Mobius.

[16] In 2012, Ramsay was slated to direct Jane Got a Gun, a movie about the farmer wife of an outlaw husband, who, after his gang turns on him, must defend herself with the help of an old lover.

[17] In March 2013, Ramsay abruptly left the project due to creative differences with producers and funders, including over the latter's demand for a happy ending.

[25] You Were Never Really Here, an adaptation of Jonathan Ames's novella of the same name, premiered to wide critical acclaim at the 70th Cannes Film Festival in 2017, where it received a standing ovation, and Ramsay won the Best Screenplay award.

The film, starring Joaquin Phoenix as Joe, a war veteran and hitman saving young girls from sex trafficking, was picked up by Amazon Studios.

[28] Following You Were Never Really Here, Ramsay hoped to next make the Civil War film Call Black Horse starring Casey Affleck, which entered the early stages of development.

The movie is co-written by Christy Hall, who co-created the Netflix series I Am Not Okay With This, and produced by Christine Romero and Roy Lee of Vertigo Entertainment among others.

[23] At the Valencia International Film Festival in 2021 Ramsay revealed that she was working on another movie with Joaquin Phoenix called Polaris.

[35] In November 2022, it was announced that Ramsay would be directing an adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s novel Die, My Love, which will be produced by Martin Scorsese and Jennifer Lawrence through Excellent Cadaver.

[40] Later that month, LaKeith Stanfield, Sissy Spacek, and Nick Nolte joined the cast, during which the project began filming in Calgary.

In an interview with The Guardian Ramsay shared that We Need To Talk About Kevin stars Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly are the godparents of the child.

[2] In 1999, before the release of Ratcatcher, she cited Nan Goldin, Richard Billingham, Terrence Malick, Andrei Tarkovsky and John Cassavetes as her creative mentors.

[45] Ramsay has also noted Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul, David Lynch's Blue Velvet and Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring as deeply moving movie-going experiences.

"[48] The Harvard Film Archive describes Ramsay as "an uncompromising filmmaker fascinated by the tremendous power of cinema to appeal directly to the senses and awaken new depths in our audio-visual imagination.

Immersive and at times almost overwhelming, Ramsay's films abound with uncommon imagery arresting for its remarkable use of texture, composition, color, music and sound.

"[49] British film critic Jonathan Romney, wrote on the topic of We Need to Talk About Kevin, "Ramsay thinks not in concepts but in images.