You Were Never Really Here (2017)
Imagine Léon: The Professional with every last scrap of warmth surgically removed, and you are somewhere close to You Were Never Really Here.
Both films pair a haunted hired killer with a young girl he is trying to save, but where Léon finds an unlikely tenderness in that bond, Lynne Ramsay's film wraps the whole thing in a sheen of relentless, bone-deep despair. Joe, her protagonist, is a traumatised enforcer who rescues trafficked children with a hammer and would plainly rather not be alive to do it. This is a revenge thriller filtered through the fog of severe, unspoken PTSD, and it wears that fog like a second skin.
It takes an actor of real stature to hold a film this internal together, and Joaquin Phoenix is exactly that. He belongs, for me, in the same rarefied bracket as Daniel Day-Lewis, whom I last watched chewing up the scenery in There Will Be Blood: the kind who does not churn out a film a year, but whose mere presence tends to guarantee a performance worth the price of admission, even when the film around him wobbles. Here he is extraordinary, hulking and broken and wordlessly sad, carrying almost the entire picture on his slumped shoulders. Take a performance of this calibre out of it, and I am not sure there is a film left standing. It is the kind of work that makes you wonder, as I found myself doing with Joker (2019), how much of a lesser thing you would have on your hands without him at the centre of it.
Ramsay is a formidable film-maker, and she shoots the violence with a bracing, matter-of-fact realism, brief and ugly and never once balletic or cool. There is a whole lineage of stylish loner-with-a-code thrillers I have a lot of love for, the Drives and the Léons of the world, but this one deliberately strips away their glamour and leaves something rawer and far harder to enjoy. Jonny Greenwood's score works away underneath it all to deeply unsettling effect, and the whole thing is assembled with real control. Every choice, from the fractured editing to the way the camera keeps its distance during the worst of it, feels considered and purposeful.
And yet. For all that I can see how good it is, the performance, the direction, the sheer uncompromising vision of it, the film left me feeling utterly hollowed out, and not altogether in a way I enjoyed. That is plainly the intended effect, and I respect a film that commits so completely to its own bleakness, but it does make it a hard one to love, or to be in any rush to revisit. There is something almost perversely withholding about it too. Ramsay is not interested in giving you a way in beyond Phoenix himself, and there are stretches where the film feels less like a story being told and more like a mood being sustained, which depending on your patience may or may not be enough.
It is superbly made and superbly performed, and about as much fun as a punch to the gut, which is precisely what it is going for. Three and a half stars, and a remarkable film I doubt I will ever quite have the stomach to sit through twice.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2026-08-24
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Studiocanal Presents Amazon Channel
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