Seven years after her last and excellent thriller drama - "We Need to talk About Kevin", director and screenwriter Lynne Ramsay is back with her new film. With a story that may not seem to be original on paper, You were never really here, it's a subtle glorious return that sounds like the Scottish director's personal stamp.
Like her previous film, You were never really here, it's not the original scenario but the adaptation of the Jonathan Ames’s novel with the same name. However, this did not prevent Lynn from making a crazy and disturbing film from the crazy thriller that focuses more on the mind of the protagonist than to the action in which he participates. Hoakin Finiks interprets the role of Joe, a war veteran whose job is to find kidnaped girls, and safely return them to the loved ones and brutally divides them with those who hurt them. He performs this job almost routinely and after saving another kidnaped girl, he gets a job to find Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), the daughter of Senator Voto (Aleks Manet), who is forced to work in a juvenile brothel. Joe, a hopeless man who at the same time acts as a personification of pain and apathy, soon finds out the real proportions of this crime and who are its participants.
Although the action does not take place quickly, in 95 minutes of the film’s duration, it does not have any redundant cadre. While we are initially getting acquainted with Joe's work and his life out of work, that is mainly down to the care of the mother (Judith Roberts) with whom he lives and who is bringing herself to the edge of death by choking herself with plastic bags, the individual scenes and whole action are slow and often confusing. When Joe accepts his new task, events are moving faster down one after the other because he finds himself in a new situation and he is personally drawn into the job, but the focus is still on the inner world of the main protagonist, and there is still not much dialogue or action. Lynn’s excellent scriptwriting move are the flashbacks through which we learn about Joe's past, in which she avoids excessive exposure. These scenes are short and effective - a pair of legs in the sand, a truck full of dead girls; more like the thoughts that Joe constantly persecutes than the cadres of his past.
You were never really here is a movie full of violence. It is not always explicit and is more often presented in the form of consequences - sometimes as a corpse, sometimes as a bloody knife on the table next to a girl who is having a dinner or Joe who cleans the used hammer. However, this may make him more disturbing than quicker scenes of brutal battles and it blurs the boundaries between physical violence that occurs at a given moment and Joe's suicidal thoughts. Similarly, without any scene of sexual violence over Nina or any other girl or girlfriend in the film, Lynn manages to make you sick only by the hints of the horrors through which they pass.
In spite of the fact that it releases more articulated sounds rather than utter words, Hoakin Phoenix is amazed by his performance. Lynn says that she found in him her soulmate for filming movies, and that he left a lot of room for improvisation and it really seemed that the two of them had a great deal of cooperation. Although it can work from the movie synopsis, Joe is not a one-dimensional hero, he does not even consider himself as a hero at all. Considering that the film primarily deals with how his past, and what he is doing right now, affects his psyche, and not his work as such and the consequences he leaves to others or the lives he saves, Phoenix's acting is definitely one of the key aspects of this film, and a part of the puzzle that perfectly fits with successful remnant.
Joe is tired in his work and because of the fact that he does good things though, although the brutality of his everyday life has no consolation. Evil with which he confronts daily and with the cruelty which he witnesses his entire life are pushing him deeper into hopelessness, which provokes violence on his part. Joe's brutality is highly accentuated, especially at the beginning of the film, while you are not sure what he is doing right now, but he is in a wonderful contrast with his human and gentle side, which he expresses primarily in relation to his mother, but later with his girlfriend Nina. The closeness between Joe and his mother, probably further enhanced by childhood with a violent father (with which we are familiar through the flashbacks), sets the basis for what appears to be his complete and irreversible descent into hopelessness and the idea that his suicidal tendencies do not remain on (very clear) thoughts when he loses his mother. On the other hand, when this man's side appears in relation to Nina, the girl in him still wakes up hope and optimism, no matter how weak he was.
Lynn has, with the help of the director of photography, Thomas Taunenda, once again showed that he is primarily a visual film maker. The compositions in the film are beautiful as well as short flashbacks, and mostly large frames provide a minimum of information on the one hand, but on the other they do not distract attention by unnecessary details that do not overlook the main character's thoughts anyway. However, probably more striking than the visual aspect in this film is sound. During the preparation for the shooting, Lynn sent audio recordings to Hoakin, which consisted of fireworks and explosions with the remark that "this is what Joe constantly hears in his head". So, the sound designer Paul Davis has made all the sounds in the film loud and in this way conveys the constant tension and anxiety of Joe's mind. This tension is accentuated by the music composed by Johnny Greenwood, moving from electronic music like Danny Lopatin's Saxophone for the Right Time of the Safdi brothers to more classic but disturbing compositions that resemble those that Grinwood composed for the Phantom Thread.
