Nailed with a hammer
YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE Cert 15 Running time 90 minutes ★★★★★
Ameaty Joaquin Phoenix is the muscle in this lean, mean and brutal thriller. The three times Oscar-nominated actor is an extraordinary blunt force of nature as a hammer-wielding man on a mission, searching for the missing teenage daughter of a US senator.
The Walk The Line star is Joe, a bearded and ponytailed anti-hero offered 50K for successfully closing the case, which includes a stipulation to hurt the people responsible.
Fifteen-year-old Ekaterina Samsonov is almost wordless as the victim, a pale, frail presence with a surprising strength of mind.
Meanwhile, 83-year-old Judith Roberts plays Joe’s mischievous and free-spirited but physically dependent mum. Their scenes offer the few moments of grace and humour in an otherwise dark and intense affair.
The violence has a punch-in-the-gut reality and at times I struggled to keep my dinner down.
With the war veteran driving through a landscape of politicians, paedophiles and prostitution, this is a stripped down and updated riff on Martin Scorsese’s 1976 classic, Taxi Driver.
Glaswegian director Lynne Ramsay never romanticises her characters, and shows that doing very bad things for a good cause is a soul-stripping exercise.
Her previous films included
Ratcatcher and We Need To Talk About Kevin, and this is no less harrowing or demanding to watch.
Nor does she make allowances for her audience, she expects us to keep up to speed and refuses to hold our hand or explain events a second time. Her bold creative choices are a very pure form of cinema and make for an anxious and jittery experience.
An extraordinary soundtrack by Jonny Greenwood underscores how the Radiohead guitarist was robbed at last week’s Academy Awards for his work on Daniel Day-lewis’s drama, Phantom Thread.
Nightmarish and nihilistic, this is as tight as piano wire and twice as deadly. Suffocation is a recurring image and for long periods I could barely breathe.
Joe, a bearded and ponytailed anti-hero, has been offered 50k to close the case and must hurt the people responsible