You Were Never Really Here
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Ekaterina Samsonov, Judith Roberts, Frank Pando, Alex Manette
Directed by Lynne Ramsay
Reviewed by Michael Dalton
[rating: 3/5]
Lynne Ramsay is obsessed with poison. The poison of society and the poison of those that wallow in it, spreading even more. After breaking the barrier with her first feature Ratcatcher in 1999 and then Morvern Callar three years later, Ramsay came to full notice with her 2011 horror shocker We Need to Talk About Kevin where she explored the implications of a child that was born evil. The tribulations of Tilda Swinton’s tortured mother, Ramsay’s main focus, left the audience uneasy but she did achieve one thing few of her peers seem capable of. By showing us only the aftermath of the crimes, she gave us screen violence that was infinitely more troubling than anything grindhouse directors and horrormeisters could ever dream up. With momentum and a keen sense of mood, she dispensed with the act itself. She’d drawn us so far into the family and acquainted us with its trials that when the demonic son finally let loose and bought hell down, it functioned more as punctuation than just another scene of carnage. Ramsay had taken us right down to the characters and let us sit snugly beside them. Now with You Were Never Really Here, she puts us in the driver’s seat.
Joaquin Phoenix is Joe, a hitman whose weapon of choice is a hammer. As soon as I heard about the film I dreaded it but Ramsay has maintained her approach, if not the style; this movie looks glossier. She mostly keeps his kills behind the door and if not completely out of sight, at least out of earshot. We see him do his work on security cameras in black and white, then with a faster than you can blink headbutt, and in the finale, quickly and discreetly. None of this makes it any less disturbing (if anything its even more effective) and it drives home just what her hero is. He has a homelife, a haunted past, and a mother who he loves but gets impatient with (there’s a scene where she won’t get out of the bathroom for him and Ramsay allows us a laugh, but only one). We’re shown brief fragments of his childhood and we see enough to know it was a traumatic one. He has seen the worst the world has to offer. Ramsay never pushes all these pieces into place nor does she need to. Such is Phoenix’s portrayal, all blazing eyes, a bushy beard, scars, and mostly mumbled dialogue, those fragments haunt his waking hours (the film begins with him attempting suffocation with a plastic bag) so each new job is like an opportunity to expel the ugliness.
I can’t declare it a great film but it’s assured and powerful and there are sequences, scored by the great Jonny Greenwood, certain to haunt you. The story, such as it is, concerns an assignment Joe accepts from a man whose daughter has been kidnapped by pedophiles. He wants her returned and instructs Joe, with regard to her captors, “I want you to hurt them”. The rescue is an exceptional sequence, a real nail biter, and Ramsay paces it in real time. You would expect it to be the centrepiece of the film but it’s actually the jumping off point. Phoenix’s physicality, at one point he hangs the hammer over his shoulder like a happy lumberjack, is the key here. Heavy and purposeful, he sees that poison everywhere. The perpetrators are in good hands.
