Review of You Were Never Really Here (2017) by Colginator — 29 Jul 2018

You Were Never Really Here is the story of an ex-FBI agent turned hired gun named Joe (Joaquin Phoenix). He has been hired by a senator to track down a 13 year old girl who was kidnapped and to inflict as much pain on the kidnappers as possible. But in his attempts to track them down, he seems to fall down a rabbit hole which leads to nothing but more violence and pain. However this story is rarely the focus and instead offers Lynne Ramsay to explore who Joe is and the horrible memories that plague his mind. As a hit-man he’s very effective, taking down his targets with nothing more than a hammer, some duct tape and a plastic bag. But as a person he is a fractured individual who is unable to escape the demons from his violent past.

This past as rarely talked about, but instead we have to piece his past through brief glimpses of the person Joe has become. We see this through the physical scars on his back, dark memories of an abusive father and sudden flashbacks of the horrors he witnessed whilst working as an FBI agent. There are often times when Joe will be doing something as mundane as waiting for a train, when we’ll suddenly get the distinct impression that he’s seriously considering jumping on to the tracks. In spite of having relatively little dialogue, Phoenix’s performance sits alongside the greats like Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver or Christian Bale in American Psycho as a portrait of a man who is unable to escape the dark thoughts which are plaguing his mind. His constant detachment to almost everyone around him mixed with his look of pure anguish shows the hard life he has put himself in, whether he deserves to be there or not. Oddly enough, in spite of how much death and violence happens in the film, we rarely see these acts of violence on screen. Instead we are often left with the visual aftermath of this violence, along with the physical and emotional scars that Joe carries with him. It distinguishes the film from other detective thrillers and mixed with Jonny Greenwood's pulsating score perfectly capturing the rhythm of the films hypnotic imagery. But the main thing that shines through the film is Lynne Ramsay’s vision of this painful life. She never relents on the cold atmosphere of violence that Joe seems to be trapped in and through this creates a powerful feature showing a damaged life, but still somehow leaves enough light at the end of the tunnel to make us think that some kind of redemption or release could still be possible.