The ghost of Travis Bickle haunts this nightmarish and enigmatic psychological drama from Lynne Ramsay, starring a slab-like Joaquin Phoenix and featuring an eerie, jangling musical score by Jonny Greenwood with bone-juddering percussive thuds that sound like gunshots or someone being beaten to death. Adapted by Ramsay from a 2013 short story by the American author Jonathan Ames, the action is elliptical, elusive, fragmented. It is a movie that teeters perpetually on the verge of hallucination, with hideous images and horrible moments looming suddenly through the fog. The movement is largely inward and downward, into a swamp of suppressed abuse memories that are never entirely pieced together or understood. All the while, the sickeningly violent action continues: bodies of brutally murdered people are always being discovered in a kind of waxwork immobility.
I have seen You Were Never Really Here twice, and it disturbed me as much the second time, though unlike the majority of critics, I don’t think it is Ramsay’s best work. There is something showy and coercive about its edits and hard cuts and soundscape lurches, and something a bit macho about the violence and the inner torture. The ending, a fantasy scene with contrived dialogue, doesn’t really work. But the shivers and eddies of fear are clear enough.
Another type of film might have attempted to widen and straighten the source material into a conventional political conspiracy thriller about a low-level tough guy out of his depth. This is very much not what Ramsay is doing with her film, which shows us only an iceberg-tip of the dirty dealings that compose its outer plot. She is far more interested in exploring a character whose life and mind have been strip-mined by the violence he has seen and perpetrated, and by his muddled, Travis-like conviction that some kind of salvation could be possible.
The antihero is Joe, who lives with his elderly mother in the house where he spent his traumatised childhood. Joe is a former soldier and law enforcement officer who now works in the murky area of “private security”, carrying out wet jobs, and much admired for his unhesitating brutality and efficiency in leaving no trace of it. He also seems to specialise in the recovery of missing teens on behalf of wealthy parents who don’t wish to involve the authorities. The very first, baffling, sequence appears to conflate aspects of his latest job with the enduring memories of his own abuse. There is a lonely image of a girl’s personalised necklace that reminded me of the similar image of a poignantly vulnerable sense of self from Ramsay’s film Morvern Callar.
He is given a new commission: to recover a teenage girl, Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), the daughter of an ambitious young politician (Alex Manette). Nina has apparently been lured into some kind of sex-trafficking ring and his employer asks Joe to rescue her discreetly while giving him carte blanche to mete out whatever retributive violence comes naturally. Joe swims in a mental soup of his own pain, as if on antidepressants, but is always apparently in good enough shape for unarmed combat.
In one disquieting scene, the best scene, a group of high-spirited girls on the town ask Joe to take their photo: he complies, naturally holding the phone panorama-style with fingertips and thumbs; the delicacy of Joe’s pose and the politeness with which he agrees to take the picture are in stark contrast to his habitual brutality, though we can’t help feeling a little nervous on the girls’ behalf. But Ramsay gives us a long, fierce closeup on the face of one; she suddenly appears frozen in shock and fear. Has she seen something in Joe’s face – or is it that she has intuited Joe’s own fear, or is Joe simply imagining everything?
Soon, Joe is to peer into the depths of a gruesome conspiracy that puts both him and Nina in danger. The action accelerates in a series of leaps and concludes without developing Joe and Nina’s relationship or giving them, for example, the kind of long coffee-shop conversation that Paul Schrader gave Travis and Iris in Taxi Driver. They are just yoked together in an image of fear. The film leaves a shudder of disquiet behind it.
