Review: You Were Never Really Here

You Were Never Really Here, director Lynne Ramsay's first film since 2011's We Need to Talk About Kevin, begins with a series of slippery images. There's a man with a plastic bag over his head, a close-up of a young boy, a burning photograph of a young Asian girl. Who is the girl? Who is the boy? Who is the man? There's a strong insinuation that violence is the connective thread, and that the narrative will be as unreliable as memory or a dream.

Indeed, the prevailing atmosphere of You Were Never Really Here, adapted from Jonathan Ames' 2013 novel, is that of the hallucinatory and surreal, as particularly evidenced by the singularly remarkable moment when a man shoots himself in the mouth in a diner, the blood-splattered waitress oblivious to his state as she rotely places his bill on the table, the paper absorbing the pooling blood. There are a few certainties, and those rely on assemblage. The man with the plastic bag over his head is Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) and he is a contract killer suffering from both a childhood trauma and PTSD. As Phoenix portrays him, Joe, despite his bulk, is a shell of a man, barely present in his own life though capable of some amount of tenderness where his frail mother (Judith Roberts) is concerned.

Joe is a hired gun specialising in finding girls trapped in sex trafficking rings and, when a state senator (Alex Manette) asks him to find and brutalise the men responsible for abducting his pre-teen daughter Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), it seems like any other job. Yet it's not, for no sooner than he accomplishes his mission and stows the drugged-out Nina in his hotel room to await the senator, he discovers the senator has been killed and two armed men are at his door, one aiming a gun directly at his head whilst the other leaves with Nina. From thereon in, the bloodletting and body count increase tenfold.

As with all her films, You Were Never Really Here showcases Ramsay's photographic eye. If nothing else, the film is an assemblage of striking compositions, whether it be a poignant shot of a girl's necklace, an evocative underwater sequence in which a woman's white tresses stray out from beneath the plastic that she's wrapped in, or presenting Joe's rescue of Nina via the chronologically disordered perspectives of multiple surveillance cameras. Jonny Greenwood's troubled, discordant score emphasises both Joe's damaged state and the hellish world that surrounds him.

For all its strengths and despite its misleadingly brisk 85-minute running time, this is a film that demands a great deal of the viewer's attention. Whether it warrants that effort is debatable, especially since Ramsay doesn't offer the viewer much reward, at least not in the conventional sense or even in the usual unconventional manner.

You Were Never Really Here

Directed by: Lynne Ramsay

Written by: Lynne Ramsay; adapted from the novel by Jonathan Ames

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Ekaterina Samsonov, Alessandro Nivola, Alex Manette, John Doman, Judith Roberts