‘You Were Never Really Here’ Review

August 13, 2020 Gabriel

Full disclosure: I was extremely hyped for this movie. A stylish thriller with sequences of brutal hand-to-hand combat, directed by a one of a kind auteur, featuring great performances and great music sounds like something that I am destined to love. Needless to say, I set my expectations too high and ended up kinda disappointed.

First, the good.

Lynne Ramsay delivers, with her technical brilliance once again taking center stage. She’s a master of synecdoche, focusing on specific, clear details suggestive of the greater whole, and her directorial powers are on full display here. This attention to detail pervades the movie and allows for excellent work both visually and aurally, especially Johnny Greenwood’s jarring score. Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as Joe, the taciturn hitman, is as good, if not better, than advertised. He goes all the way into the character, bringing him to life with every hammer swing, bad joke, and garbled phrase. As for the other characters, well, there aren’t any.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The focus is squarely on Joe, his memories, his traumas, and his experience of events. The film does a great job placing the viewer in his fractured point of view, weaving memory, speculation, hallucination, and suppression into the events as they unfold to give us an idea of how Joe sees the world.

Now the bad.

The film is very stingy in how it parses information. Much of the violence and horror goes unseen, cut around or mediated by CCTV feeds and broken mirrors so it’s never really here clear. Part of this is Ramsay’s style, part of this is thematic: reflecting Joe’s internal suppression of violent memories and events. And we as the audience know what happens, but without seeing it, it loses much of the impact it would otherwise have. As a result we have a thriller that isn’t very thrilling, and is really more of a drama. This is a film where the primary danger, and the primary source of tension, is physical (Joe saving the girl as a metaphor for saving his own soul aside) and if the audience is removed from the physical violence and danger associated with it, then the film becomes devoid of tension or violent catharsis, which I ultimately found unsatisfying.

Where the movie excels is in other scenes. Scenes of Joe at home, on the street, and interacting with those in his life are interesting and funny. The movie also has its share of strange, dreamy moments that outshine pretty much anything else that happens in it.

You Were Never Really Here is extremely well-made; it’s stylistically and thematically coherent, but in the end, I wasn’t crazy about the final product. My problems with it aside, this is a very good movie and deserves to be watched.