SHORT TAKE

Araw, jagged, rumbling machine of blood and disquiet, You Were Never Really Here sees Joaquin Phoenix at his best: when he barely speaks at all.

There’s little need for talk in his character’s line of work. Joe is a hammerand duct tape-wielding hitman roped in to rescue the abducted daughters of well-to-do men. “They said you were brutal,” one employer asks. “I can be,” he mutters.

The job and its attendant traumas weigh heavily on him, as do childhood terrors. The film finds him, in quieter moments, thinking about suicide.

Phoenix has few lines. And this is for the best considering his tendency to mumble incomprehensibly no matter the role. Instead, the rage and feeling are carried in his body, stiff as a soldier’s, hunched and tense. (He won Best Actor at Cannes this year.)

Director Lynne Ramsay ( Ratcatcher, We Need to Talk About Kevin) is known for the haunting poetry of her images, and when applied to appalling subjects such as this, it produces a persistent feeling of skin crawling – heightened by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s industrial, malevolent score. At times, she places us in Joe’s shoes, the first-person somehow making us complicit.

Beguiling as the grittiness is, this pulpy story feels well below what Ramsay should be tackling, or what she is capable of. She conjures the doom and unease well. But after that, what else is there?

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