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There are two sorts of British movie — the kind that wins awards, and the kind that makes money. Lynne Ramsay has been known for writing and directing the first kind since 1995, when Small Deaths, a short she made in film school, won the Prix du Jury at Cannes. Her third short, Gasman, took the big prize at Cannes too and the 32-year-old Scot's first full-length film, Ratcatcher, became an art-house hit. But with her latest effort, a psycho road movie called Morvern Callar, Ramsay may finally be positioned for box-office success. Her movie has a riveting — and bankable — young star, Samantha Morton (Minority Report). It has a respectable budget, $6 million, and a hip provenance: it's based on Alan Warner's 1995 cult novel, which was part of a Scottish literary charge that also yielded Irving Welsh's Trainspotting — and that became an international smash-hit movie. And if any further proof were needed that Morvern Callar isn't destined to be just another much-lauded "little film," it wasn't even shortlisted this year at Cannes.

Ramsay's response to the Cannes disappointment was, she says, "a bit mad": she got married. An hour before she was due to fly out, her publicist hired a boat and captain. The fancy flowers and frocks from the premiere became bouquets and wedding dresses, and 20 km offshore, to the sounds of a porno flick being shot on a nearby island, Ramsay and her boyfriend, rock musician Rory Kinnear, said "I do." "I think the whole thing cost 20 quid," she says. "It felt like a Fellini film."

It's no surprise that Ramsay's life takes surreal twists. So do the lives of the characters in her films. Morvern, which opens in the U.K. on Nov. 1, tells the story of a supermarket drudge in a Scottish seaside town who wakes up one Christmas morning to find her boyfriend dead beneath the Christmas tree, among the presents he wrapped for her before slitting his wrists. She opens the presents, smokes a lot and cries a little, pulls on her new leather jacket and leaves to meet her best friend Lanna for a night of drink, drugs and sex with strangers. On her return, Morvern discovers on her computer screen her lover's final gift, a novel he'd completed before killing himself, along with the farewell message, "I wrote it for you." Morvern takes him literally, typing in her own name as author and posting the manuscript to a publisher. She then empties the boyfriend's bank account, chops him up, buries the pieces on a hillside and flees with Lanna in search of some thrills in Spain.

What drives Morvern's impulsively bloody behavior? Warner's novel offered no convenient explanations, and Ramsay wisely resisted the temptation to insert a Hollywood-style pop-psychological back-story. Her heroine, she says, is just "an ordinary girl in extraordinary circumstances who acts in a way that is totally unconventional." This is familiar territory for Ramsay. In Ratcatcher, set in a grim 1970s Glasgow housing project during a refuse collectors' strike, a young boy tries to send his pet mouse into outer space, tied to a balloon.

Ramsay came late to that kind of weirdness. Raised in a working class district of Glasgow, she was weaned on nothing more unconventional than Douglas Sirk and Bette Davis movies. She stumbled into filmmaking on a whim. The strength of her still photographs won her a place in the cinematography program at the National Film School in London. In 1995, her graduating year, she turned three of her own stories about childhood loss of innocence into Small Deaths. At the time, Ramsay recalls, "many students were worried about not getting a job. But I always felt you were at college to take risks." Hers paid off at Cannes.

Her second short, Kill the Day, a nightmarish junkie tale, won the Clermont-Ferrand Prix du Jury, and 1997's Gasman, about the tangled relationships of a family on its way to a Christmas party, reclaimed the Cannes prize. It also won her an invitation from BBC Scotland to write and direct Ratcatcher. Her work to date may be art-house, but Ramsay wants to be in the cineplex, too. "I also want to make films people want to go and see," she says. "I don't see myself as being élitist in any respect."

Ramsay isn't waiting around to see whether Morvern Caller will be her breakthrough movie; she's already writing an adaptation of Alice Sebold's runaway best-seller The Lovely Bones, which is due to begin shooting next summer. She remains unperturbed by the recent collapse of the production house that commissioned her for the job. It's just another extraordinary situation, calling for unconventional action. Ramsay will know what to do.

• MICHAEL BRUNTON
• Morvern Callar could make art-house director Lynne Ramsay a household name