YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE – Review

Joaquin Phoenix in Lynne Ramsay’s YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE, an Amazon Studios
release. Credit: Alison Cohen Rosa | Amazon Studios

Joaquin Phoenix plays a traumatized veteran who has built a career out of tracking down and saving missing girls, until one job goes very wrong, in the psychological thriller YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE

A few years back, a film called WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN turned up in theaters, one of the most disturbing and frightening of films about parenting gone as wrong as possible. The director behind that devastatingly horrifying film was a Scottish writer/director Lynne Ramsay, whose other films are RATCATCHER and MORVEN CALLAR. Ramsay is also the creative force behind YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE, which is based on a noir thriller by American writer Jonathan Ames.

Lynne Ramsay is considered, by some, to be one of the world’s greatest living filmmakers. If you were unconvinced of that, this film may change your mind.

If you want to go for disturbing, casting Joaquin Phoenix as the lead is a good start. Joe (Phoenix) is an Iraq War veteran who has carved out a career as a gun-for-hire who rescues young girls for their families, often from child sex traffickers Joe works in the shadows, generally in the in the seedier parts of inner city Cincinnati, where he not only finds and retrieves these girls but punishes the captors.

But Joe himself is a mess, haunted by memories of war and other trauma. He lives a lonely life in a modest old home where he takes care of his elderly, confused mother (Judith Roberts). His kindness and devotion in caring for his sometimes sassy, sometimes playful mother shows a side that contrasts sharply from his brutal work while showing the same careful attention to detail. His obligation for his mother’s care seems to be the only thing that keeps him from going through with his frequent suicide attempts.

Joe getting his assignments from a man named John McCleary (John Doman) but otherwise mostly lives a secretive life apart. But one assignment upends Joe’s settled if violent routine. The assignment starts like any other, to rescue Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), the runaway daughter of a state senator running for higher office, Sen, Albert Votto (Alex Mannette). But after Joe seizes the pre-pubescent, blonde-haired Nina from her captors, everything unravels, sending Joe down an entirely different path.

With a jangling, dissonant score by Jonny Greenwood, YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE is unsettling from the start but transforms in unexpected ways as it moves towards its end. Director Ramsay inverts the emotional trajectory of typical action films, skillfully taking us to a resolution that is both different and the same, an emotionally satisfying resolution but one we do not expect.

In many ways, the film suggests the best of film noir, a genre that combines crime and violence with a questing for life’s meaning and human connection. The juxtaposition of the ordinary and brutal is startling in this noir-ish film. Against a backdrop of violence, it is filled with quiet little moments, of visual beauty or fleeting human gestures. The direction is masterful, with every shot beautifully composed and packed with subtext. No moment feels accidental or unnecessary in this film yet we are never conscious of the director’s hand and are swept up in the story’s current.

Joaquin Phoenix is outstanding in this role, one of the best uses of his considerable talent in a long time. It is a more sympathetic part than we usually see the actor in, and a welcome change from again playing the “crazy” character we frequently see him as. Phoenix shines as this complex, troubled character. Joe is a complicated man who is both efficient and skilled in his work and a vulnerable person under his professional veneer. Watching Phoenix as he peels away the layers to reach Joe’s human core is moving and impressive.

The film does have a few minor hiccoughs, primarily that there are a couple of scenes where it is hard to discern the softly-spoken dialog over background sounds that are there to provide important subtext to the scene.

YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE is an impressive film, combining all the elements of a dark crime thriller while both transcending and transforming the genre utterly as it transforms its lead character. YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE opens Friday, April 20, at the Tivoli Theater.

RATING: 4 out of 5 stars