You Were Never Really Here

Lynne Ramsay returns with another dreamlike and disturbed character study

This review contains spoilers…

Joe is more beast than man. Falling into a weight category somewhere between a grizzly bear and a juiced-up Travis Bickle, he dominates the screen, skulking the neon streets of Cincinnati with a heavy, inhuman hunch. One particular scene of shocking and dramatic violence — where gun-for-hire Joe clears out a depraved paedophile den with his favourite tool, a hammer — is shown via grainy, monochrome CCTV footage, more akin to night-vision cameras stationed in the habitat of a rarely sighted nocturnal predator. It is just one of director Lynne Ramsay’s unusual and inspired stylistic choices. Cinematographer Thomas Townend’s camera shoots Joaquin Phoenix’s Joe subjectively, often uncomfortably close as if the camera hopes to gain access to this pervasive and damaged mind, yet knows to keep some semblance of distance from this force of nature. In an impressive performance that once again straddles the boundaries of sanity, Cannes’ Best Actor Phoenix appears to have gained as much fat as he has muscle, his fridge-like shoulders barely able to fit inside the film’s tight frames.

It is an outstanding cinematic collaboration. Ramsay returns for just her fourth film — and first in the six years since the magnificent and equally disturbing, We Need to Talk About Kevin — teaming up with Phoenix to create a stark portrayal of damaged goods with a special set of skills, a film that lends more to her previous work than is immediately obvious. A ferocious revenge noir about a contract killer named Joe and his mission to save a senator’s young daughter from a paedophile ring, it soon descends into something even darker, dragging the audience through the depths of a morbid conspiracy.

Though lending itself to the same broad genre, it is a much more visceral and darkly sensual experience than a Taken or a John Wick. In fact, there is not much dialogue, nor are there many discernible action scenes as expected of the genre. But Joe’s world is a chaotic and cacophonic one. Exterior sounds — the melody of the city, the cymbal crashes of sudden violence, the hum and thrum of internal numbness — are as useful to Ramsay as her varied images in depicting the subjective, dreamlike, and often hallucinatory world of an individual’s response and post-traumatic path subsequent to experiencing an unexpected and violent tragedy. The sounds of the city are suffocating and the action pulsates along to Johnny Greenwood’s best score to date, often a throbbing dissonance of electronic hums and metallic crashes. In one particularly moving scene Greenwood’s score breaks out into rapturous harmony, a stark and obvious moment away from the bedlam.

In this sense, You Were Never Really Here is the ultimate audiovisual experience. Though based on a novella by Jonathan Ames, Ramsay has managed to create something that feels like a purely cinematic work. Image and sound meld together in a post-traumatic synaesthesia, reminiscent of the violent flashes of disjointed memory that haunt Tilda Swinton’s destroyed mother in We Need to Talk About Kevin. Ramsay is obsessed with the minutiae of Joe’s life: the literal and psychological paraphernalia that make up his fragmented and splintered world. It is a life made up of parts: the bag of Joe’s working tools, his ticking watch, the knife he torments his suicidal urges with, even the drinks cans and wet wipes that he tenderly leaves in his car. But there is also the emotional baggage that Joe carries with him, shot by Ramsay in equally vague and stylised flashes. Something referring to his time serving in the military and the FBI — and what he witness there — appear as hazy scenes filtered through the garbage dump of his mind. Ramsay has always mastered the subjective camera eye, shooting the exterior worlds of her films with an aesthetic of brutal realism — see Glasgow-based Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar — elevated by interior poetic bursts. Cincinnati runs red with neon blood, a microcosm for the depths of Joe’s mind.

Trapped within his claustrophobic potboiler of a life, Joe searches for a release, often only found through acts of terrible violence, whether inflicted upon himself or those deemed much more deserving. But it is a release that Ramsay’s film never hopes to offer him — and us. You Were Never Really Here is more of a mood piece than a thriller. It isn’t as satisfying as an all-guns-blazing action flick, but it is tenfold more captivating. In a more traditional film of this ilk, natural momentum carries us towards a grand finale at the big bad’s lair, quickening our blood in the process. In You Were Never Really Here, we are baying for blood by the time Joe reaches the Governor’s house, practically foaming at the mouth for the rough justice that we have been promised through Joe’s brutal nature. But the film refuses us this. And subsequently, in an outpouring of emotion that comes in torrents, the dam built of short, sharp, staccato moments of emotional intensity finally breaks, and Phoenix’s performance sings.

Though Ramsay’s leaner reimagining of the noir genre has clearly been hacked to pieces in the editing room, it leaves in its wake a stunning work of collage poetry: a psychologically-driven character study stitching together the fragments of its protagonist’s tattered life. Formally ambitious right from its disorientating jigsaw-puzzle opening frames, to its enigmatic and reflective closing moments, Ramsay has taken a well-trodden genre, dismembered it, and rebuilt it from the ruins, disguising a deep exploration of damage — and the emotional and physical scars that many of us carry — as a neon-drenched thriller. It’s more reminiscent of Taxi Driver, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Drive, but utterly unique in its own way. A symphonic arrangement in brutal technicolour. With its short run time of 85 minutes — and no possibility of a Taken 5: Here We Go Again-type sequel — its telling is as anxious as its needs to be. It is a sensually rapturous work of cinema that has the rare, and powerful effect of surprising us when the lights come up, but not leaving us needing more, whether we want it or not.