Joaquin Phoenix riveting in the haunting ‘You Were Never Really Here’
Seven years ago, the gifted Scottish writer-director Lynne Ramsay made a bleak and unsettling domestic horror film titled “We Need to Talk About Kevin.” Her latest feature, her fourth in nearly two decades, is a hypnotically grim New York crime thriller called “You Were Never Really Here.”
Both movies are named after pre-existing source material, which makes it a sly coincidence that Ramsay has now directed two consecutive movies that confront the viewer with strong, declarative statements. The directness of those titles feels true to the arresting quality of Ramsay’s cinema but also somewhat at odds with the feverish elusiveness of her methods. She has a great deal to say and a hundred artfully oblique ways to say it.
At first glance, “You Were Never Really Here,” adapted by Ramsay from Jonathan Ames’ tough-minded 2013 novella, would appear to be a lean, well-crafted exercise in art-house pulp. The movie runs a sleek 89 minutes — roughly speaking, about a page per minute of screen time — and it feels as brutally stripped down as its anti-hero, a gloomy thugfor-hire named Joe, played by Joaquin Phoenix in what might be his most rivetingly contained performance.
But there is more to admire here than a simple economy of form and content, and the spareness of Ramsay’s approach is no mere approximation of Ames’ hard-boiled prose. The texture is as gritty as the filmmaking is exquisite. The hard shimmer of Thomas Townend’s camerawork, the sudden convulsions of Joe Bini’s editing and the juddering intensity