Lynne Ramsay earned a spot on my directors-to-watch list with 2011’s We Need To Talk About Kevin, a thoroughly unsettling film about the early life of a school shooter. Any director that manages to get a decent performance out of John C. Reilly instantly earns my attention, and the film’s editing and cinematography was outstanding. Ramsay’s previous major offering was 1999’s Ratcatcher, a film that turned heads at Cannes before being promptly forgotten until its Criterion re-release many years later. Finally, Ramsay has returned from relative obscurity with 2018’s You Were Never Really Here, and this is likely her best work to date.
Joaquin Phoenix stars as Joe, an abuse survivor/war veteran suffering from PTSD. This isn’t exactly a fresh topic in the world of performance-driven indie films, but You Were Never Really Here takes a slightly different approach than you might expect, and that’s largely due to Ramsay’s focus on style. Let the anti-intellectual style-over-substance accusations commence.
Phoenix’s damaged veteran lives alone with his ailing mother (played by Judith Roberts, Eraserhead alumnus). The scenes involving Phoenix and Roberts are both heartbreaking and humorously sweet. Their banter is the only aspect of the film with anything that resembles levity, and even these scenes involves a rather disturbing portrayal of dementia. This film is a bleak affair, which should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Ramsay’s work.
Throughout the film, Joe is plagued by flashbacks of his traumatic past. We’re never given the full picture, just snippets of wartime atrocities and child abuse involving asphyxiation. Joe regularly suffocates himself with plastic bags, and engages in several other forms of self-harm. Some may take issue with the lack of concrete revelation regarding the particulars of the main character’s trauma, but those particulars aren’t really relevant to the plot. I personally didn’t give a shit why Joe was constantly breathing into plastic, because it seemed like a logical action for a clearly self-loathing character. You do you, Joe.
In order to make ends meet, Joe works as a sort of mercenary rescuing young girls held captive as sex workers. It’s made clear that Joe is exceptionally brutal in his work, and performs the sort of tasks that the agencies he works for would rather distance themselves from. After the son of Joe’s middleman begins to recognize him, he meets with his handler to discuss new job opportunities. The handler informs Joe of his next mission: discreetly rescue the daughter of New York State Senator Albert Votto.
Joe breaks into the brothel that Votto’s daughter, Nina, is being held at. In a scene that would likely be a balls-out grisly action sequence in a typical summer blockbuster, Joe slaughters the brothel’s patrons and security guards. For the most part, the violence is shown through black-and-white security camera footage, providing the audience the same emotional distance Joe is feeling during this event. The score (which I’ll touch on later) backs off significantly, and in place of the usual boom-y action movie music, we get the drowsy pop tune “I’ve Never Been To Me” by Charlene.
When Joe finally fights his way to Nina, she’s noticeably despondent. On their way out, Joe has one last kill to make, and requests that Nina cover her eyes. She doesn’t, and appears completely unaffected by Joe’s brutality. To show her gratitude, she attempts to have sex with Joe, who pushes her away.
In their brief time together, Joe and Nina silently bond over their tortured pasts. Nina seems comfortable around Joe, in spite of the atrocities she’s recently witnessed. The most obvious connection between the two is their tangible emptiness. Post-traumatic stress has reduced them to shadows of their former selves. They exist only as objects to be used by more powerful human beings. In Nina’s case, she is now capable of nothing more than providing sexual pleasure to pedophiles. In Joe’s case, he’s a mercenary that blindly follows the orders of strangers in suits with briefcases full of cash. Neither character seems particularly happy with their station in life, but both feel they lack the free will to escape their circumstances, and the self-worth to desire healing.
While the parallels drawn are certainly fascinating, this is where I feel the film begins to enter on-the-nose territory. If we break down my previous paragraph into simpler terms, it looks like this:
Joe is a veteran with PTSD. Nina is a child sex slave with PTSD. They both experience symptoms of PTSD. They have this in common.
It sounds rather pedestrian when you phrase it like that, and in some ways, it is, but the film has a more focused agenda. At its core, You Were Never Really Here is about how America loves to shit on its veterans and set them up for failure. By juxtaposing these two characters, we get a side-by-side comparison between veterans and child sex slaves, and for the most part, the film treats them as similar people with similar experiences. I don’t feel that the PTSD=PTSD “metaphor” is particularly groundbreaking, and while the fact that both have suffered and will continue reliving that suffering isn’t in question, I don’t feel that veterans and child sex slaves quite deal with the same struggles as the film often seems to purport.
To me, bashing your audience over the head with commentary is a terribly egregious offense that implies intellectual disrespect. You Were Never Really Here isn’t as obvious (or tedious) as something like American Sniper, a movie that absolutely earns a chorus of groans (accompanied by plenty of ZZZZZZs) every time Bradley Cooper has a lame flashback and starts sweating profusely. Thankfully, this film is well-crafted enough that I never audibly groaned at how obvious its commentary was, and I never once thought of how sick I am of PTSD portrayals in general.
The first big, giant, GLARING strength of the film is its cinematography. I felt that its camera tricks and gimmicks were earned. Still, the key word here is GLARING. Not everyone is going to respond well to its visual style, and if you wanted to discredit the film as trying way too hard, I couldn’t exactly fault you. There’s plenty of visual metaphor to digest on a second viewing as well.
The second greatest strength of this film is Johnny Greenwood’s score.
I tend to rave about Greenwood’s scores, and when I do, I always feel that I’ve come across as an obsessed Radiohead fan who recently discovered that people put music in films. My strong affection for Radiohead aside, There Will Be Blood, Phantom Thread, Norwegian Wood, The Master, and We Need To Talk About Kevin, have demonstrated that Greenwood has long since transcended his 90s slacker rock days, and his name should be spoken alongside the more well-known (yet inferior) movie musicians of history.
A rather common criticism of film scores is that they’re too emotionally manipulative, and essentially tell the audience precisely what they should be feeling at any given moment. Ironically, the composers we give the most credence to are anything but subtle. Hans Zimmer and John Williams, for example, are practically household names, but they’re known for gaudy action/drama scores. Other less-revered (and often superior) composers enjoy talking about how a good score should linger quietly in the background, and if your music sticks out, you have failed. It’s a rather defensive position, but I understand the sentiment. I feel that Greenwood has struck a very important balance between these two schools of thought. His work in You Were Never Really Here is at times abrasive, but only when it serves to create a surreal atmosphere. In other instances, his score is even further from the foreground than would be typical, or is absent completely. The primary quality that separates Greenwood from his contemporaries is his strong sense of when bombardment of the senses is necessary, and when it would just be more interesting if he shut the fuck up. This quality is on full display here.
Typically, in a review of a film quite obviously not meant for wide appeal, I shamelessly delve into spoilers with the same zeal found in future valedictorians who raise their hands so often in class that the teacher pretends they’re invisible. In this case, I’m seeing massive banner ads all over IMDB and commercials on YouTube, so the likelihood of the general public becoming aware of this film (and having the ability to track it down) is far higher than other similar films. There’s little in this review that you can’t gather from the trailer, so don’t feel like reading my synopsis is an excuse to stay home instead of going on the cinema.
Because of Ramsay’s deliberate pacing, many will find this film rather dull. It’s been advertised as a cerebral action movie, a sort of high-brow recreation of Taken or Man on Fire. You Were Never Really Here is more in the vein of a complex character study, so if gratuitous violence and virtuous heroes are what you’re looking for, it will likely disappoint. In my opinion, it’s one of the best films of the year so far, but then again, I am Ramsey’s target demographic. This sort of highly-stylized character study is right up my alley, and I can’t wait to watch this on repeat.
9/10