In moments of extreme duress he suffocates himself with a dry cleaning bag, as if re-enacting his most damaging childhood trauma might finally exorcise its aftereffects. Joe is tormented by all the women he couldn’t save, and he sees signs of them all around him, every day. Shocking splinters of flashbacks intrude throughout, providing jagged glimpses of grisly wartime atrocities and harrowing hints of domestic abuse. The film is far less interested in where Joe’s going than in what’s driving him there. Of course the senator’s missing daughter is just the beginning of vast conspiracy that stretches all the way to Albany and the governor’s mansion, in a deliberately vague plot that’s presumably more parsed out in the Jonathan Ames novella on which Ramsay’s screenplay is based. Joaquin Phoenix as Joe and Ekaterina Samsonov as Nina in "You Were Never Really Here." (Courtesy StudioCanal)
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You feel like you see a lot more violence in this movie than you actually witness. All of the sudden there’s just a naked man lying dead on the hallway floor and a blurry shape moving through the shadows.
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The rescue is depicted in silence, via a series of pixelated black-and-white security cameras that always cut in a moment or so too early or too late to catch Joe in action. (“I want you to hurt them,” the politician tells our protagonist.) So it’s early in the film that Joe winds up re-enacting Travis Bickle’s climactic whorehouse massacre from “Taxi Driver,” but Ramsay pointedly veers away from Scorsese’s Grand Guignol purge. We’re locked inside Joe’s head with him, aching for a moment’s peace.Ī sleazy state senator’s daughter (Ekaterina Samsonov) has been kidnapped by an upscale sex-trafficking ring run out of a tony Manhattan townhouse. (Phoenix spends an important expository scene sorting through a handful of jelly beans, trying to find a green one.) Jonny Greenwood’s eclectic score jerks from ethereal synths to pizzicato strings, mixed with an artfully cacophonous sound design of industrial noises and muffled murmurs. “You Were Never Really Here” is shot through the erratic eyes of its unreliable narrator, always infusing stray details with paranoid portents or just drifting away into distraction. What’s immediately arresting is the way Ramsay shoves us into her protagonist’s shattered perspective. Joaquin Phoenix as Joe and Judith Roberts as his mother in the film "You Were Never Really Here." (Courtesy StudioCanal) He calls himself a hired gun, but a ball-peen hammer is Joe’s weapon of choice. When not doting on his ailing, elderly mother - the two playfully riff on “Psycho” to sum up their relationship - Joe finds missing kids for cash, working for a mysterious fixer (John Doman) and meeting contacts out of the backs of bodegas or determinedly non-descript New York office buildings. It’s like a Charles Bronson movie directed by Alain Resnais.Ī thickened-out, slab-like Joaquin Phoenix stars as Joe Rogers, a frazzled Afghanistan Veteran suffering from what appears to be a massive case of PTSD. “You Were Never Really Here” is an icky, rotgut noir filtered through a prism of abstract art.
It’s a nerve-shredding, artsploitation action picture, with Ramsay mixing and matching elements of Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and John Boorman’s “Point Blank” to create something audaciously all her own.
(I usually never watch movies for a second time at festivals, but this thing is such a monster I couldn’t resist.) screening at this past January’s Sundance Film Festival was start making plans to see it again. The first thing I did after emerging dumbstruck from an 8:30 a.m. Writer-director Lynne Ramsay’s “You Were Never Really Here” is a bone-rattling, 90-minute panic attack that sends you staggering out of the theater in a daze. Joaquin Phoenix in the thriller "You Were Never Really Here." (Courtesy StudioCanal) This article is more than 4 years old.
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