Lynne Ramsay is returning to the Croisette for her fourth feature You Were Never Really Here, which is playing in competition at the Cannes Film Festival this week. The project stars Joaquin Phoenix and she adapted it from the Jonathan Ames novel. In it, Phoenix plays a war vet who devotes himself to saving women being exploited by sex traffickers. Things go very wrong when he tries to save a girl from a brothel in New York City. The subject is timely and topical, and the soldier’s methods are harsh – and lethal.

Amazon Studios picked up the film in Cannes last year in a competitive situation. Ramsay last touched down in Cannes with We Need To Talk About Kevin in 2011, which also played in competition.

In this exclusive clip, we see Phoenix’s character in a hooded sweatshirt slowly walking down the hallway of a building before exiting into a back alleyway only to be met by an attacker. With sounds of an alarm bell from the building ringing in the background, Phoenix’s character easily takes out the attacker, leaving him curled up on the ground in pain. He soon hops into a yellow cab – but with no sense of urgency or fear – and tells the driver to head to the airport.

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Take a look at the clip above.