You Were Never Really Here (2018)

Early in Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, there is a scene between Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) and his mother (Judith Roberts) were they polish silverware. It is the type of quotidian scene that could be reflected in any number of number of films about the everyday experience. What makes this scene stick out so vividly is that Joe is no ordinary person. He tracks down women who have been kidnapped, likely for sex trafficking. The people who hire him do so because he doesn’t just kill those responsible, he brutally extracts revenge on behalf of who hired him. This isn’t a typical film about a contract killer. Joe is plagued by the war, he has trouble expressing himself, and when needed, has a penchant to use a hammer.

Phoenix is the perfect performer to take on the role. Not many actors have the ability to express multitudes with very little being emoted. He has bulked up for this role, he isn’t muscular, he is just more lumbering than usual though. The violence he enacts seems to take a physical toll on him. But in the end, the physical world he exists in is a prism into what is boiling beneath the surface.

Ramsay, who is a director that purposefully obfuscates the action in her films, is well suited to subvert the material at hand. Very similar to her last film, We Need to Talk About Kevin which took a story about a mother in the wake of her son committing a mass shooting at a school and turns it into a horror, You Were Never Really Here takes the body of a story and whittles it down till there is barely a skeleton left. She isn’t focused on plot, she is focused on Joe. And, Joe, particularly performed by Phoenix, is a fascinating character to spend a film with.

One of the most interesting decisions by Ramsay is the way she depicts the violence. She let you witness it, but it is often obscured. In the first violent set piece, the entirety of the action plays out on a security came and later in the film when Joe is having to slowly defend himself from a would be killer, Ramsay keeps the action tight, focusing on the faces of two men fighting for their very existence. Violence isn’t taken lightly in this world.

Interestingly, Ramsay employs an original score from Johnny Greenwood. While I think the piece of music on its own is intoxicating, in the context of the movie it pulls you right out. It is a score that isn’t dissimilar to his work on There Will be Blood. While the dissonant and hypnotic rhythms of that score pull you along into the endless mystery of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, there is something about the use of it here that shifts the balance and destabilizes the proceedings.

But Ramsay is operating in full immersion. She drops the audience into Joe’s headspace, never alleviating the viewer from his tortured perspective. And, in this she is pitch perfect. Yet, in the end, there is an emotional remove that makes this film tough to penetrate. Phoenix is extraordinary in the film, but there is a futility to much of the film. Ramsay is perfect at letting the audience feel the otherworldliness of this universe while still grounding it in reality. The misgivings I have with the film are wholly a reflection of me and I’m positive that she got the intended effect out of me that she wanted. For some, that might be enough to carry you to a fully rewarding experience, but unfortunately for me there was too much emotional distance.

Regardless of my ultimate takeaway, it would be a shame to wait another seven years for another Lynne Ramsay film. She has a wholly unique perspective that needs to be seen. Her films are challenges, outright meditations on trauma that can’t be ignored. You Were Never Really Here might have left me cold, but there is no doubt that it was helmed by one of the most invigorating independent directors on the planet.

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