Review: You Were Never Really Here

You Were Never Really Here
Cert: 15 / 90 mins / Dir. Lynne Ramsey / Trailer



I'm not going to lie, as intriguing as the trailer for You Were Never Really Here looked, the pullquote-assertion of "Taxi Driver meets Drive" did not fill me with gleeful joy; partly because of the self-aggrandisement of that statement, and partly because I'm one of about twelve people who didn't particularly enjoy either movie*¹.

Anyhow, this is based on Jonathan Ames' book of the same name, and adapted for the screen by director Lynne Ramsey. A shady senator hires 'urban mercenary' Joe (Joaquin Phoenix*²) to recover his kidnapped daughter Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), a job which is messy and successful in equal measure. But before Joe can return the girl to her father, the senator is found dead at the foot of a high-rise, part of a conspiracy which will unfold very close to home...

It's grim and it's thoughtful and it's quite, quite marvellous. Phoenix makes his performance look simultaneously draining yet effortless; every frown, scowl and grimace adding to his humanity, rather than creating a mask to hide it. Although the film's violence is frequent and unflinching, he doesn't exude menace so much as an exhausted, numb fury, sick of juggling the mundanity of everyday life and his own PTSD - which for a man in Joe's line of work is even more terrifying.

But this isn't a romp of Wickian proportions. Ramsey's work is beautifully shot and paced, the lingering camerawork and measured lack of rushed exposition testing the audience's patience from the start*³. From a film-making, story-telling point of view, this is a meticulous ballet of contemplative anger. It's also the second film I watched in one day where people get attacked with hammers. So that's a thumbs-up from me...

The film isn't an easy-watch and very deliberately so, but You Were Never Really Here is a thing of savage beauty.

Drive, Blue Ruin.



If you can, it is.
(this movie doesn't have a very wide release, unfortunately).



It's a buy-er, for the nights when you feel like watching Scarface but only have half that time available.



It's certainly high on everyone's list.



If you start railing against it, that's likely.



There isn't.



Level 2: So, Joaquin is in this (obviously), and he was also in 2012's The Master along with Laura 'Holdo' Dern.





*¹ Both are works where everyone told me how masterful and life-changing they'd be before I'd watched them, perhaps building unrealistically high expectations. It took me three attempts to watch all of Drive. The pullquote's comparison is narratively and tonally apt of course, except that in You Were Never Really Here, Joaquin Phoenix plays the interesting character which Drive's Ryan Gosling doesn't. There. I said it. ^{[ BACK ]}

*² I definitely like Michael Stuhlbarg best when he's being his Joaquin Phoenix character. You can't see the join. ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ As the final screening of Saturday's #FilmDay, this was the largest audience of my day, and also the film least suited to having an auxiliary soundtrack of popcorn rustling. Not that this stopped them, of course. That said, this was also the screening featuring one patron who'd sneaked his dog into the cinema in a bag (to the animal's credit, it wasn't disruptive or distressed at all, it just made sporadic, curious yelps) and was seen as the credits rolled with a 600ml bottle of beer in his hand, not a single fuck given. So that was a new one, at least... ^{[ BACK ]}


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• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
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