Phoenix rises brilliantly to the grim, gripping occasion
Tim Robey FILM CRITIC
You Were Never Really Here
15 cert, 85 min
★★★★★
Dir Lynne Ramsay Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Ekaterina Samsonov, Alex Manette, John Doman, Judith Roberts
Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here dropkicks you into a cosmos of pain, depravity and blunt-force trauma with only the faintest flickers of light at the end of the tunnel. It’s not an experience to relish, exactly, but it’s still fully capable of blowing you away.
The Scottish director begins this, her first film since We Need to Talk About Kevin in 2011, as she means to continue: with a series of swift, disorientating images, initially in a Cincinnati motel room. We see a bloodied hammer, the burning photo of a young Asian girl, polythene over a smoke alarm. And a man’s head, breathing in and out, inside a plastic bag. This is Joe (Joaquin Phoenix, with an unruly grey beard), and in the first proper look we get at him, he has completed whatever the hell his hideous business has been, and emerges, hoodie up, into a side alley.
Joe rescues children from sex rings. He is hired to do so, not by authorities, but private clients – typically the parents of teenagers who have gone missing, and who entrust him to do this vastly unpleasant job with speed, finesse and a willingness to bludgeon the perpetrators beyond repair.
The film’s body count is high, but Ramsay is far too serious a filmmaker to dwell on Joe’s brutal modes of dispatch. She and her editor, Joe Bini, find an amazing array of methods to conjure and intimate violence without lingering on it: the film is a sustained masterclass in avoiding ghoulishness.
What it has no intention of avoiding is moral consequence. It’s a thriller that makes itself sick, rather than giving us the thriller-satisfaction other directors, even good directors, might have wrung from the material – a hardboiled novella by Jonathan Ames.
In Phoenix, Ramsay has a major ally in staking her case for bleak psychological artistry. Weighed down with the horrific ballast of things Joe has suffered and seen – he’s a Gulf War veteran and former FBI agent, too, with the scars to prove it – he comes to life in an almost gruellingly subtle and interiorised performance, up there with Phoenix’s very best.
The one person in Joe’s life with whom he has anything other than a strictly professional relationship is his mother, played by a little-known but tremendous actress called Judith Roberts. She’s in the pronounced stages of dementia, living in a messy Queens home to which he retreats between jobs. The main plot kicks in all of a sudden, when Joe’s supervising figure (The Wire’s John Doman) sends him to meet Senator Votto (Alex Manette), whose 14-year-old daughter, played by a blank-staring Ekaterina Samsonov, has disappeared. “I want you to hurt them,” he is told, by a father clearly in the process of scooping out his soul, and Phoenix’s silent but pensive response tells us full well that this goes without saying. Joe’s preparations first involve a grim shopping spree, and the camera faintly closes in on a $16.99 ball-peen hammer, with “Made in USA” written on it, which will rarely stray far from his grasp from here on out.
No praise could be high enough for Ramsay’s insidious sound design and use of background music in the film, which deploys doo-wop ballads on the radio with haunting, rather than thumping, irony, and features a mumbled singalong to Charlene’s I’ve Never Been to Me that will go down in legend: the hand that tenderly clasps Phoenix’s during this bizarrely romantic interlude is about the last one you’d ever matchmake him with. Meanwhile, even by his own unbeatable standards of film work, Jonny Greenwood’s score is a deadly engine of threat and anguish.
It is hard, harrowing stuff. But the immensity of Ramsay’s film lies in the scalpel surgery of her image-making, distilling and triple-distilling the stuff she shot to make every second count. Some of the quickest shots do the most damage, but when the camera finds a vivid contrast – like Joe crumbling a green jelly bean in his fingers, or his hefty bulk swinging down a corridor with a Pre-raphaelite wench peeking out from behind – the pauses count, too. Joe even stops on the street, accosted by a gaggle of tourists to take their photo in Soho, and two worlds surreally collide for a beat, as the girls obliviously pose and laugh while he puts his bag of death equipment down to give them a hand. In these staggeringly taut 85 minutes, Ramsay sees a hopeless universe in a jelly bean.