If you can get past the brutality and darkness of its subject matter, You Were Never Really Here is a beautiful movie. Lynne Ramsay paints a surreal picture with vivid colors and a twisted electronic beat. Joaquin Phoenix’s hulking destroyer marches through a bleak and wretched world with a singular vision of vengeance and justice. He cannot be stopped even though the work he does destroys his mind and body. What he’d be in another life or another line of work is frightening to think about, but he seems to have found his calling regardless of the toll it takes. The world Ramsay has created exists just beneath the one we inhabit – that may be the scariest part.
Joe is a killer – of that, there’s no doubt. His motives aren’t clear from the start, but they will be soon enough. A clue is revealed when he picks up a pay phone, saying only “It’s done.” Back home, Joe takes care of his aging mother and hides in the closet with a plastic bag over his head. He’s tortured by something, or perhaps many things. We’re given small, only seconds long glimpses of what these might be, but never the full picture. Ramsay leaves a lot to our imagination, and she does it just right.
You Were Never Really Here has such a visceral, textural presentation, you can feel it on your skin. It’s a very violent film, but, thankfully, the savagery is often handled off screen, or, as in one sequence, completely through grainy security camera footage. This does nothing to quell the uneasiness but shows that Ramsay isn’t strictly interested in carnage for the sake of carnage. The combination of sounds and colors offers a unique experience like the best of horror films, but easily better than average entries in that genre. The Shining (1980) comes to mind at times but more as a spiritual influence than a hackneyed one.
Phoenix delivers the best performance of his odd career as Joe. There are obvious nods to De Niro’s Travis Bickle, but again, in a non-derivative way. He’s clearly troubled, but I’d stop short of calling him crazy. In the scenes with his mother (Judith Roberts), he’s a downright doting son. He’s able to turn it on and off – to be a good son when needed and a vicious killer when it’s time for that. Phoenix plays him as an introvert without a lot to say, but whose actions speak volumes.
You Were Never Really Here can be hard to watch, but it’s singularity forces attention. Often, it plays like a lucid hallucination or fever dream, but it’s worth your time if you can get past the grimness. At times it’s like staring at a painting by Francisco Goya – with monsters eating children and demons influencing dreams. You could look away, but you won’t because you need to know what happens, and you need to see bad men punished.
James is a writer, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.