Films > Film Reviews
You Were Never Really Here
Cinema City
12/03/18
Shuddering into focus is Lynne Ramsay’s lean and mean You Were Never Really Here, a PTSD-addled thriller where ‘PTSD’ stands for ‘Phwoar, That’s Sreally Dgood!’ (I don’t know how acronyms work).
Joaquin Phoenix plays bedraggled gun-for-hire Joe, a violent do-gooder who rescues young girls from the wrong hands, and who wields as many emotional scars as he does physical. These scars bubble to the surface in bouts of distress, jolt-TRAUMA-ing in and TRAUMA out of TRAUMA frame. His childhood is stained with the abuse of his father, he served in the army, and he then went on to work for the FBI - in short, he’s seen some shit.
So a rescue mission - to retrieve a senator’s daughter, Nina - is just another day in the life. Tape and hammer in hand, we see his hazy preparation and carrying out of this operation, though, crucially, the violence is left to the imagination.
In truth, most is left to the imagination - from the perspective of Joe, whose supply of meds is dwindling and whose target, Nina, is forcing him to confront his past, it’s hard to distinguish what’s real and what’s simply his subconscious rising to the surface. Lynne Ramsay is a figurehead of visual poetry, and here she trades the lyricism of Ratcatcher for the haphazard wreckage of Joe’s mind. In one superb scene where he takes a group of tourists’ photograph, his two worlds merge together: the expressions and the expressionism.
While You Were Never Really Here may masquerade around as a millenial Taxi Driver on its surface, it’s an entirely different beast. This is a character study of the subverted hitman: he’s less assured and more a quivering wreck, he finds solace not in sex but in sing-a-longs with his dementia-riddled mother, and his muscle has given way to flab.
Though there’s nothing flabby about the narrative: shot in a month, with a thin script that was reworked on set, Ramsay has seemed to have gone at it with a hammer and left only the impressionistic sinew. It’s a terrific experiment, keeping the framework of a conventional thriller and doing away with the ‘conventional’. It may have a runtime of 85 minutes but You Were Never Really Here is less breezy and more an arthouse hurricane (fit with flying cars and cows). It blows you away.
Contributing to the cyclone is Jonny Greenwood, who follows up his sumptuous work on Phantom Thread with a guttural, string-synth concoction that’s fitting in its fracture. The score screeches to a halt just as its melody becomes melodic, pairing the trauma Joe has to endure. The one contrast is a brief interlude towards nature and away from the nervous hullaballoo of the city - it’s met with a gorgeous, yearning string melody that speaks of solace. For Joe, it’s fleeting.
Ramsay’s one misstep is in her characterisation of Nina. She gives in to her Hollywood sensibilities (that plagued We Need To Talk About Kevin), injecting her with a stoic quippiness that feels detached from reality (which is the point) but also detached from Joe’s mannerisms (which defeats the point of their parallels).
Yet everything else shimmers with grime, harmonious in its discordance. Ramsay has taken a well-worn narrative and stripped it down to the senses. Its ending doesn’t offer retribution to our world-weary hero - in fact, perhaps the opposite - but it lingers on a distant something . The past may rise up to confront Joe, but from here, there’s no going back.
9/10