In 2011, I named Scottish film-maker Lynne Ramsay’s third feature, a brilliant adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, as my favourite film of the year. Since then, Ramsay has talked enticingly of making “Moby-Dick in space” and walked away from the female-led western Jane Got a Gun. In the process, she’s apparently earned a reputation for being “difficult”, a term first whispered during her battles to bring Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones to the screen, an ambition eventually realised by Peter Jackson, with dismal results.
Now, with her fourth film (from a novella by Jonathan Ames), Ramsay offers a riposte to anyone who ever doubted her talent or her working methods. Combining the visual poetry of Ratcatcher with the dizzying first-person fugues of Morvern Callar, You Were Never Really Here is a head-spinningly accomplished work that reconfirms Ramsay as one of the most thrillingly distinctive and daring film-makers of her generation.
Joaquin Phoenix is a lumpy symphony of pain as Joe, a bedraggled hired gun who specialises in retrieving lost kids. He has a reputation for brutality, a useful asset when searching for a senator’s missing daughter, Nina, eerily played by rising star Ekaterina Samsonov.
Armed with a ball-peen hammer (a weapon that chimes with his traumatic childhood memories), Joe sets out to return the child to her father. But beyond the handsome price tag, his motives are personal and his deadly endeavours will bring the chaos of his work back home.
Along with a Cannes best actor award for Phoenix, this Palme d’Or contender also earned a best screenplay trophy for Ramsay, a particularly sharp choice considering how sparse the dialogue remains throughout. Reimagining Ames’s page-turning source, Ramsay strips out explicit exposition, conjuring an elliptical world through which the audience must find its own way. The focus is on Joe’s inner turmoil, creating a kaleidoscopic portrait of his fractured psyche, interspersed with flashbacks that offer clues to his shattered emotional state.
We meet our antihero with his head in a plastic bag, his face contorted in a silent scream. Later, he dangles a dagger into his open mouth; a combat-shocked veteran, hungry for death. In some ways, he’s already dead, a wraith-like figure who, as the title suggests, leaves no physical trace in the world. Everywhere, he sees ghosts of the past: a child killed in a war zone; a container full of dead bodies. Most significantly, he’s haunted by the spectre of an abusive father whose violent rages the young Joe was powerless to oppose.
Now Joe spends time between jobs caring for his elderly mother (a heartbreaking Judith Roberts), tending to her needs, worrying about her wellbeing. Psycho may be playing on the TV in the family home (one of several horror-movie nods), but this mother’s boy is no mere Norman Bates. A scene in which Joe and his mum polish the cutlery together while gently singing “A” You’re Adorable is full of tenderness and affection, reminiscent of the beautifully understated scenes between Jason Miller and Vasiliki Maliaros that are nestled amid the growing mayhem of The Exorcist.
The Shawshank Redemption pops up on TV too, as we hear Tim Robbins opining that the Pacific “has no memory”, signposting this film’s own baptismal journey of death and rebirth. Like Taxi Driver’s depiction of “God’s lonely man”, there’s something of the cracked messiah about Phoenix’s Joe, from his unkempt hair to his scarred and tortured body, as bruised and battered as his mind.
Thomas Townend’s granular cinematography places us right inside Joe’s crepuscular world, a collage of close-up physical details – hands, fingers, eyes. Passages of lyrical beauty are interspersed with grotesque eruptions of violence, although even these have a surreal quality, whether filtered through the black-and-white gaze of surveillance cameras or reflected in the shattered glass of an overhead mirror.
Brilliantly chosen pop songs provide ghoulish counterpoint to the grim action (neither Angel Baby nor I’ve Never Been to Me will ever sound the same) while Jonny Greenwood’s pulsing, throbbing, clanging score heightens the sensory overload as it meshes with Paul Davies’s immersive sound design.
It all adds up to an overwhelming experience, a slice of pure cinema from a director who refuses to dance to the beat of anyone’s drum but her own. From the disorienting opening to the enigmatic finale, Lynne Ramsay is always really here, her commanding vision shining through every frame.
