I’m a known sucker for just about anything noir or even noir-ish – I mean, my most anticipated movie of 2018 is The Happytime Murders, which might be best categorized as “Muppet film noir” – so Lynne Ramsey’s latest movie, You Were Never Really Here, is more or less right in my subjective wheelhouse. It is dark as hell, unrelenting, and viscerally satisfying even as the grotesque imagery disturbs you. With yet another star turn from Joaquin Phoenix in the lead role, it gives the hero/antihero dichotomy a third look, with a detective who suffers from PTSD due to repeated traumas and channels some of that energy into finding missing girls – and into brutally beating his adversaries with a hammer.
Based on a novella by Jonathan Ames, You Were Never Really Here gives us Joe (Phoenix), a private detective who seems obsessed with secrecy to a paranoid extent, and who we see from the very start engages in self-destructive behavior like nearly asphyxiating himself in dry-cleaner plastic bags. He returns from a successful rescue in Cincinnati to see his boss, McCleary (John Doman of The Wire), and eventually receives a new assignment to rescue the missing daughter of a widowed state senator. Beginning with an address that the senator received via an anonymous text, Joe stakes out the building, which he suspects is a brothel with underaged girls inside, but the rescue attempt opens him up to a broader conspiracy – perhaps justifying his earlier paranoia – and a spreading web of violence that puts everyone close to Joe in the killers’ sights.
The mystery around the missing girl, Nina (played by Ekaterina Samsonov, who is 15 but looks much younger for this role), is secondary to the story of Joe, which we get via brief, often disjointed flashbacks as they might appear in Joe’s own mind as he re-experiences traumatic memories from childhood, where his father was abusive to him and to Joe’s mother; and from his time serving in the Army in the Middle East. The depiction of trauma is hard to watch, but ultimately realistic in how the brain revisits the trauma and the actions a victim might take as coping mechanisms that don’t do anything to solve the long-term problem. Rather than use the traumatic history as a plot device – here’s why Joe is the way he is – the film shows the ongoing damage he’s suffering from it. To the very end, there is no indication that Joe, who wants to assure Nina that thinks will be okay, is anything close to okay himself.
Phoenix is tremendous in this role, delivering a more nuanced performance than he did with his Oscar-nominated impersonation of Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, giving Joe the right level of simmering rage that gives little warning before it boils over. He won Best Actor at Cannes last year, just about a year ago this week, for the film, which also won the Best Screenplay award there for Ramsey. (It lost the Palme d’Or to The Square, which is a poor choice and seems a very Cannes thing to have happen.) Samsonov is a revelation in a small but critical role, one that becomes much more important and, I would imagine, difficult for a child actor, as the story progresses and Nina becomes more than just a prop for the plot.
The film is dark in the literal sense as well, with grimy shots of alleys and stairwells, disorienting top-down shots of Joe in action, and even some violence (almost all of which is left off-camera) shown as if on security-camera footage. The hammer is Joe’s weapon of choice, for reasons that become apparent in the film as well, but Ramsey films the various assaults from behind Joe or from such a distance that you don’t actually see the hits. There’s blood in the film, but it’s all shown after the fact, and in those cases it’s not Joe’s doing; the one time we see Joe interacting with one of his own victims, the result is morbidly comic and almost sentimental, one of the only times we get a glimpse of Joe’s deeply empathetic streak when he’s not beating someone’s brains in.
The lack of air is a recurring motif in this film, a possible metaphor for the feelings of panic and the sense of being ‘trapped’ that often haunt PTSD sufferers until they get real help (not just, say, cognitive behavioral therapy, which doesn’t work for PTSD). There’s no sign here that Joe has ever sought treatment, so he’s caught in a cycle of reliving his traumas, even dissociating for moments, to the point where I expected it to eventually cost him in a physical conflict. (I won’t spoil whether that happens.) But we keep returning to situations where he can’t breathe, or finds someone in such a situation, which certainly mirrors the experience of having a full-blown panic attack.
This isn’t a movie for everyone or even for most people; it’s grim, there’s enough results-of-violence on screen to merit the R rating, and while we see none of the abuse of underaged girls, it’s present enough in the story that it would likely deter many viewers. I think it’s superb, however, reminiscent of the bleak noir novels of Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me, pop. 1280) or Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?. While not quite as hopeless as those books can be, You Were Never Really Here captures that same sense of existential darkness, and like Thompson’s books in particular, it succeeds in getting us inside the head of the protagonist and using the crime as a vehicle to explore his character in a way few films in the detective/noir genre have done.