Amazon Studios
I recall a few years ago that the weirdly buff Sean Penn was in a movie where he played a badass mercenary doing morally gray business with a heart of gold and revenge against a betrayal. I didn’t really buy it, he never felt like a real damaged warrior. But that was that movie, and this is a different story.
You Were Never Really Here comes from writer/director Lynne Ramsay, based on the book of the same name by Jonathan Ames. We follow the path of Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), a military veteran and former FBI agent who’s basically a sort of detective for hire, except that he works exclusively with tracking down young girls kidnapped into sex trafficking.
The movie plays on perceptions and reality, showing us through alternate visions and disruptive sounds and music how Joe is suffering from PTSD. Yet despite his deep trauma, he is highly effective, and once it’s clear what he does for a living, it all begins to fall into place. He also lives with his elderly mother, taking very good care of her, tying together the themes completely about loss and protection.
Everything changes when Joe gets a new job, to recover the kidnapped daughter Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov) of Senator Votto (Alex Manette), who wants things to be done without cops because he’s on the gubernatorial ticket. But it’s not so simple, and darker secrets are revealed that lead Joe on his own version of bloody vengeance.
It’s not like the typical kind of movie revenge fantasy, because Joe is damaged and the movie creates a sense of disorientation and confusion around him. He is searching for an end to his suffering in a way, but in a way, he doesn’t think he’ll ever find it. As is typical though for this sort of movie, the girl is the linchpin.
But the movie does things differently in its bloody action scenes. Clever cuts and surprising depth of characterization, changes in music or perspective, and often the near-diegetic music overpowers any normal sound like his memories threaten to overwhelm his senses.
It’s a powerful movie in a lot of ways, despite being a typical sort of underlying plot. What makes it more interesting is the dynamic, harrowing performance at the center, Joaquin Phoenix showing up convincingly as a badass with a tragic backstory, like Taken except more involved with the internals of the mind than the showiness of the wanton murders.
All that together means it’s hard to recommend this movie to the casual moviegoer, even those with a taste for bloody revenge thrillers. You have to be able to handle and absorb the deluge of intensity and disorientation, the way it’s more about making you feel that the world is falling off a cliff instead of raising your adrenaline. For me, it is a very strong movie despite its simplistic plot, a movie worth your time if it sounds like your sort of thing.
You Were Never Really Here has a run time of 1 hour 30 minutes and is rated R for strong violence, disturbing and grisly images, language, and brief nudity.
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