FILM OF THE WEEK
You Were Never Really Here Cert: 18; Now showing
It’s been seven years since Scottish director Lynne Ramsay performed cinematic alchemy with her adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin. While it might be the last film you’d recommend to an expectant mother, it confirmed what many had suspected about Ramsay’s substantial powers, both as a screenwriter and filmmaker.
Since then, she has chopped and changed projects, a series of false starts and “artistic differences” getting in the way of any return to the omniplex. And then she blindsides us with this dark confection.
Based on a Jonathan Ames story, this is both a white-knuckle thriller and an intimate character portrait of a lone wolf who is capable of saving any life but his own.
Joaquin Phoenix is reliably mesmeric as Joe, an avenging angel for hire who specialises in rescuing kidnapped children, often from the vice industry.
Ruthlessly efficient and brutal at what he does, Joe remains heavily scarred from his time serving in the Middle East. Any control he had of his personal affairs is shaken to the core when he breaks open a paedophile ring with links to elite hallways of power.
A tug-of-war between Joe’s demons and his heroic abilities begins to impose itself.
Phoenix — one of Hollywood’s pickiest actors — and Ramsay duet with a hypnotic fizz from the film’s epicentre. Joe is an indelible screen avenger, as striking and slippery as any Leon or Travis Bickle.
The plot mightn’t seem revolutionary but it is in the soft touches and elliptical manoeuvres of Ramsay’s screenplay — as Joe lurches between salvation and collapse — that the spells are cast. And Jonny Greenwood’s throbbing score is the blood in the entire outing’s veins.