Ramsay’s ‘You’ a brutal thriller
Unspoken emotions rippling across Phoenix’s face
Some filmmakers rust during periods of inactivity; Lynne Ramsay arches and tenses, lying in wait like an attack dog. And attack she does, though not in all the expected ways, in her astonishing fourth feature “You Were Never Really Here,” a stark, sinewy, slashed-to-the-bone hitman thriller far more concerned with the man than the hit. Working from a pulp-fiction source that another director might have fashioned into a “Taken” knockoff, Ramsay instead strips the classically botched job at the story’s core down to its barest, bloodiest necessities, lingering far more lavishly on the unspoken emotions rippling across leading man Joaquin Phoenix’s face, and the internal lacerations of trauma and abuse they cumulatively reveal.
With the minimalism of the material providing the cleanest of canvases for the matchless technique of director and star alike, “You Were Never Really Here” isn’t the genre crossover effort Ramsay’s admirers may have feared, or possibly even have wished for. Rather, it’s a kind of art-house signal flare, reminding the industry of perhaps its greatest working filmmaker not to work often enough.
Arriving six years after “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” and emphatically consigning her unfortunate departure from the production of “Jane Got a Gun” to the recesses of memory, it’s the most contained of her features to date. Razor-cut to just 85 minutes, it’s marked by a precision that belies its allegedly hastened completion in time for its Cannes competition premiere. The absence of closing credits at the film’s first press screening truly feels like its only missing detail: Thomas Townend’s cinematography, Joe Bini’s editing and a singularly juddering, disconcerting score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood all feel considered to the nth degree.
Following her marvelous “Kevin” and 2002’s “Morvern Callar,” “Here” extends Ramsay’s highly idiosyncratic style of literary adaptation, in which the written word is taken as a half-erased foundation for a more impressionistic, sensory evocation of the psyche at hand. Jonathan Ames’ 2013 novel of the same title is a crackling 90-page session of grisly shock therapy that reads very much as a readymade screenplay treatment. Writing solo for the first time since her 1999 debut “Ratcatcher,” Ramsay turns it inside out all the same. Adding an entire closing act to its death-trail narrative, her laconic screenplay also more tenderly exposes the soul of Phoenix’s protagonist Joe: an ex-FBI agent and Gulf War veteran, now making a grim living as a contract killer specializing in the sex-slavery trade.
Introduced in the middle of one of his evidently continual suicide attempts, Joe is a grizzled grizzly of a man, wasting not one more word than necessary on clients and professional allies, and reserving what kindness hasn’t been pummeled out of him for his elderly mother (a fine, aching Judith Roberts), with whom he lives in his yellowing childhood house in Queens. Expanding significantly on the relationship as described in the novel, Ramsay picks out piquant observational details to etch a quiet mother-son bond grounded in shared anguish and victimhood, with delicate domestic nuances that are plainly the work of the woman who made “Ratcatcher.” Stray, chilling incursions of a man’s admonishing voiceover into the film’s densely layered soundtrack are all we need to fill in a backstory of severe spousal and parental abuse. (RTRS)