Review: You Were Never Really Here

I don’t like criticising movie for not being what I expected, sometimes it works in the movies favour by surprising me, other times it feels like bad advertisement. In the case of You Were Never Really Here the constant comparisons to Drive and Taxi Driver (both all-time Top 10s for me) easily caught my attention but after watching it the first time I felt let down by a much slower and methodical piece. Having watched it for a 2nd time, now knowing what to expect, the film did improve but it’s still flawed in ways that kept it from rising above a good film.

My main issue is the story is VERY light to the point of non-existence, essentially it concerns Joe, a hired gun in New York who is tasked by State Senator Albert Votto to rescue his young daughter Nina from a secret brothel. Joe carries out the task but then immediately everything turns to shit and Nina is lost again.

If you think from there the film is about Joe saving Nina then you’re mostly wrong, rather the majority of the 2nd half of this film is about Joe finding everything in his life being torn apart by the people chasing him. It’s a bit iffy, on the one hand the consequence of violence is a major theme here with Joe suffering flashbacks from the violence of his past - abusive father, his time as a soldier and what appears to the aftermath of a sex trafficking ring gone wrong – so having him deal with the consequence of his actions in such a brutal and personal way does make sense.

On the other hand, without any semblance of a proper villain until the last ten minutes, these random acts of violence just feel random, we don’t know who’s chasing Joe, we don’t know how they’re finding out everything about him and we don’t fully know why they’re doing it. You could make the argument that once we actually get to put a face and name on the villain then it can be assumed their own power and money gave them all the resources they needed but that still leaves the film fairly hollow in terms of an actual coherent story, instead we’re left with the message of ‘No Good Deed Goes Unpunished’ that’s stretched out for 40 minutes.

Acting is hard to really go into with everything mostly focussing around Joe, everyone else in the film; his mother, his handler, his employer, all of them have about one or two scenes each so don’t really factor in the film all that much, even the villain has only two scenes and no lines so they’re hardly even worth mentioning. His mother does enough to show us the close relationship the two of them have, probably a by-product of their shared abuse, but I would’ve liked to have seen more of their relationship.

The only real person that factors more into the film is Nina, though even she is missing for most o the 2nd act. In a lot of ways she acts as a parallel to Joe, where his life was dominated by violence hers seems to be about sex and the damning influence of abuse, actress Ekaterina Samsonov has this great dead-eyed look about her during certain scenes. But she almost represents a level of hope and by the end you’re hoping she can come out of this for the better.

Joe himself, played by Joaquin Phoenix, is definitely the highlight of the film, powered by self-destruction and a massive beard it’s one of the more interesting performances of Phoenix’s career, not as showy as The Master which had a similar style of self-destruction but the subtly hints towards PTSD and the few but often shocking explosions of violence keep Joe as a character to keep an eye on. Much like the rest of the film nothing is spelt out about Joe, his abusive childhood is given a fair look through flashbacks but his time in the war and (according to Wikipedia) the FBI aren’t ever fully explained, just shown amongst the rest of his tragically violent mindset, he’s a man on the brink of madness, constantly flirting with suicide but having found a purpose in saving child victims from paedophile rings. It’s important to note that in company Joe can appear relatively normal; he’s friendly when he needs to be, tough when he has to be and overall doesn’t give the impression of being a violent person, it’s when he’s out of company that he flips. By himself his suicidal thoughts take over and he’ll try suffocation with a plastic bag, never fully going through with the act, and with his enemies he’ll attack with swift brutality and a fucking hammer to the skull, we don’t often see the hit but the slew of bodies Joe leaves in his wake is enough to show what he’s capable of.

While the rest of the film suffers from not saying enough, Phoenix’s body language sells the show don’t tell nature of Joe’s character, if nothing else the film is worth seeing once for his performance.

Director Lynn Ramsay – whose name might be familiar to anyone who ended up hating teenagers with We Need To Talk About Kevin – has done an exceedingly good job with crafting this movie, one thing I can’t fault it for is the complete lack of fat, Ramsay throws you right into the thick of it and doesn’t let up until the credits. Perhaps a little bit of fat to bulk up the story might have worked in its favour but Ramsay is clearly going for the less is more approach and I can’t say it doesn’t work, as mentioned early we don’t often see Joe’s act of violence but we see the consequences of them which is often just as bad and ties into the central theme of living with violence.

I’ve heard people call this a deconstruction of the hitman genre and I can see that to an extent, Joe is still an exceedingly violent person but it’s through his environment rather than him being naturally good at killing and his desire to help Nina is less through any specific code but instead just because he’s a good-hearted, compassionate person who wants to do good even if it’s in a bad way. The complete lack of any action scenes works in the film’s favour because Ramsay gives it this slow-burning, almost dream-like quality and any bouts of action would be detrimental to the film’s tone. I would argue that Ramsay does make the film too slow, simply because lacking a strong narrative, the slowness feels bogged down because there’s little to drive it forward.

Comparing You Were Never Really Here to Taxi Driver was a mistake the begin with, Taxi Driver is about a man at war with world while You Were Never Really Here is about a man at war with himself, it’s not the film I wanted it to be and that is a disappointment but having had the chance to think things over it was never going to be. I won’t call it a bad movie because it is a really good character piece and the combined efforts of Phoenix and Ramsay allow them to showcase a broken and tragic man trying to be a good person in a bad world. It’s just lacking a central drive to keep the movie going, as soon as Nina is saved the film just goes in circles telling the same message 3 or 4 times over before tailing off for the ending, and I get the point of it all, I understand WHY the film does that but understanding does not make it engaging or interesting to watch.

7/10