In Lynne's Ramsay's films, the monstrous occupies the same space as the sublime, and every image pops off the screen. There isn't a more visceral filmmaker working today, and You Were Never Really Here, her sensory trip about an avenging angel of death, is her most complete movie to date.
Like all Ramsay films, including Morvern Callar, Ratcatcher and We Need to Talk About Kevin, this one hits you in the gut on its way to crawling under your skin. Every person and place encountered by Joaquin Phoenix's Joe, a damaged veteran who finds kidnapped children and kills their captors with a ball-peen hammer, oozes with foreboding. You don't watch You Were Never Really Here. You fall into it, one shot and sound at a time.
Ramsay never tells when she's able to show, and she's always able to show. We meet Joe, a glowering, heavily bearded tank of a man in a hoodie, right after he's finished a job in Cincinnati. He wipes the blood off his hammer, wanders into the night (dead pigeons at his feet), head-butts a would-be mugger, and heads back to New York. But we're already catching glimpses of Joe's past, rendered in masterfully spiced, almost subliminal flashbacks of childhood abuse and grisly jobs. These aren't sequences so much as flashes of a tormented interior life. You Were Never Really Here is a haunting film, and Joe is the one it haunts most.
I've found that the films that hit me hardest have very little to do with plot. They operate more like cinema injected into the veins. So, yes, Joe is hired to rescue a senator's adolescent daughter from a sex ring, and he soon finds he's up against something way bigger than he is. But that doesn't tell you much, and it doesn't really need to. (If you require full comprehension, a second viewing is recommended). The film's spell is cast by the assurance with which Ramsay puts sound and image together, by Jonny Greenwood's hypnotically percussive score, and, perhaps most impressive, by Phoenix, whose performance earned him the best actor prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival.
Phoenix has always had a touch of Brando in him, the seething, fully committed immersion in a character that makes you forget you're watching a guy speaking memorized lines. In You Were Never Really Here, he combines intense physicality with teeming inner life. Joe has scars over much of his body, and he moves like a man weighed down by the world. But he's not a monster, and You Were Never Really Here, for all its brutality, is not a cruel film. At times it is oddly funny. It's painful, because it's largely about pain.
Few filmmakers pay so much attention to sound (also a strong point in a film that came out earlier this year, Thoroughbreds). The sharp thud of a knife falling point-down into the floor. The dull but oppressive roar of city traffic. Whispers that could belong to the past or the present. It all works in harmony with Greenwood's score and its undulating beats.
Some have compared You Were Never Really Here to Taxi Driver, which isn't hard to do: violent, unhinged avenger chasing redemption by freeing a girl in peril. But this film, based on the novel by Jonathan Ames, is very much its own thing. Taxi Driver is a referent, not a template. Ramsay has a gift for stripping away everything until all that remains is her piercing artistic vision. Hers is a scary world, vivid but ambiguous, that happens to contain great amounts of beauty. It's a deeply rewarding experience for those who can take it.
