Review of You Were Never Really Here (2017) by Hnestlyonthesly — 12 Oct 2019

You Were Never Really Here is one of my favorite films of the year. I saw it for the first time in Palo Alto with a friend shortly before I started this project of writing reviews. I liked it so much that I took a pretty big chunk of Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot to talk about the good year in film that Joaquin Phoenix is having. The film is a study in objectivity. The depiction of violence is clinical, sterile. The would-be climax in any other action film is seen at a distance on grainy security cameras in black and white, or in the blindspot of those cameras, to be more accurate.

Much of the first act is more about depicting the act of caring for an aging parent with dementia, even more so than his exploits as a hired gun. The cuts to his troubled home life as a child, hiding with his mother from his drunken father, breathing deeply into a plastic bag, which at first look is disorientingly erotic until it’s clear that the only sex depicted in this world is not sex at all. The erotics of the film are passionless, animated by shame and compulsion, the same forces that drive Joe to wait at the top of the stairs for his bottle of pills.

The camera lingers on Joe as he pulls out the domestic items for his violent job–a roll of duct tape, two cans of soda, a bottle of water, some candy. The slick, twee coolness of the ball peen hammer on display in the hardware store has worn off. Instead of the romance of the gun or blade, we have the simplicity and barbarity of this tool-turned-weapon, a swords-to-ploughshares story in reverse.

The music and sound are excellently done. The static, digitized filters over the first ten minutes are alienating and eerie, and communicate the trauma of Joe’s most recent skip-tracing job, the images of dead girls in the back of a trailer truck flash through his mind.

The title of the movie is itself the lyrics of a song that remain unspoken in the title sequence. They’re meant erotically, but there are so many other applications of the metaphor. The spy trope. His diligence and attachment to secrecy, which prevent him from forming stable relationships.

I love the metatheatrical gestures to cinema, Psycho and scary movies, his reenactment of the stabbing in the morning, and the surreal gentleness he shows to the hired gun on his kitchen floor, as they sing the lyrics to an 80s love ballad.

The fragmented flashbacks to Iraq, and the short story of the candy bar are a genius bit of storytelling. So much detail is spent on the stories that mundane domestic objects can tell that even the sweets in Joe’s employer’s room, the jellybeans, are freighted with foreshadowed significance. What does he do when he finds his favorite green jellybean? He crushes it.

Other arcs of the film are so beautifully original and philosophically provocative: the funeral’s interruption at the vision of the girl. Joe’s apparent change of heart at that moment, with the unloading of rocks. He doesn’t change out of his funeral clothes as he arrives at the mansion. Reality breaks down as surrealist images permeate the visual field. The false bottom ending is a masterful stroke. Joe’s emotional reaction at the discovery makes for such a complex palette of anxiety.

You Were Never Really Here is a must see, a beautiful, tragic character study of violence packaged in a popcorny action movie.