Movie Review: You Were Never Really Here

You Were Never Really Here (2017) 

Directed by Lynne Ramsey 

Written by Lynne Ramsey 

Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Judith Roberts, Alessandro Nivola

Release Date April 6th, 2018

Published November 14th, 2018 

You Were Never Really Here is an ugly masterpiece. Writer-director Lynne Ramsey takes us into the dark and twisted mind of an uncomfortably sympathetic killer. Joaquin Phoenix’s Joe is undoubtedly a bad man, a cold-blooded killer but who he kills here matters and makes him relatable in the most skin-crawling, discomfiting ways. The story is dark and mean and gritty as is the direction and design of the film and it all comes together to make one of the most engrossing and enervating movies of 2018.  

We meet Joe in the wake of his latest set of murders. Wielding a ball-pein hammer, Joe has murdered several men and is wrapping up his nasty work by erasing any trace of himself that may be at hand at the scene. Joe has been unleashed like a nasty pitbull upon a group of child pornographers and he’s done his nasty business put them out of their nasty business. Joe rescues children but he does so outside the law and he does so with severe brutality. 

Joe himself, we will come to find, was the victim of much abuse as a child. That abuse shaped Joe’s compassion and desperate need to protect the innocent via his almost mindless brutality. Yet it also formed him into a dutiful and loving son to his impaired mother (Judith Roberts). What happened to Joe’s mother has become part of his very being down to his choice of weapons of destruction but I will leave you to discover the connections. 

Joe’s latest job is set to pay him nearly half a million dollars. In any other movie this would create a desperate need for escape via financial freedom but if Joe cares about money he doesn’t let on. Joe’s job is to rescue the daughter of a State Senator who has gone missing and may have fallen victim to human traffickers. Joe does his brutal work but something goes wrong in the aftermath and now Joe is on a track for revenge. 

That last line of my plot description is deceptive. A track for revenge would be what happens in another, lesser movie. What Lynne Ramsey does with this aftermath and seeming notion of vengeance is something you will need to witness for yourself by seeing this remarkably bleak and fascinating movie. The film is dark and gritty and yet carries an ironic soundtrack filled with often bubbly forgotten pop songs that manage to underline how stark the story and characters of You Were Never Really Here are. 

You Were Never Really Here is not a movie for all audiences. The film is blood-soaked and grim with a dark irony that will turn off those with more mainstream sensibilities. Don’t go looking for typical thriller beats in this movie or well-worn suspense tropes, You Were Never Really Here is a grim character study turned Greek tragedy. If that notion is unappealing to you perhaps you should consider going to see The Equalizer 2 in theaters this weekend. I’ve heard it’s a corker but one with a familiar beat and a Denzel Washington performance you can dance to.

That’s just not the vibe of You Were Never Really Here. That doesn’t, in itself, make it superior to something more mainstream and conventional like The Equalizer, just more artful and experimental. Far less classically ‘entertaining’ to be sure but if you are on it’s intellectual wavelength and dig the dark and gritty, you are going to adore You Were Never Really Here for it’s bold, unconventional approach to the thriller genre.