Lynne Ramsay’s Extraordinary ‘You Were Never Really Here’ Starring Joaquin Phoenix [Cannes Review]

An early shot in Lynne Ramsay‘s “You Were Never Really Here” shows a door handle in a dingy hotel on which hangs a battered sign: Do Not Disturb. It is advice Ramsay herself thrillingly fails to take with her astounding fourth feature, in which she disturbs, deconstructs and dumbfounds in equal measure. Widely anticipated as an arthouse take on Jim Thompson-esque hardboiled gritty genre fare, while it is that, it’s also very far removed from so schematic a description. A film of prismatic brilliance, in which single images convey the information of entire scenes, scenes play like short films, and quasi-subliminal edits create psychology as raw as an open wound (and there are plenty of those too), this 85-minute-long movie is the cinematic equivalent of finding the ocean in a drop of water. “You Were Never Really Here” cannot be described as “arthouse goes genre”  because from Ramsay’s  vantage point, so stratospherically far above the majority of mere mortal filmmakers, those distinctions don’t exist. There is just filmmaking of the purest, most inventive and energizing kind.

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“You Were Never Really Here” is based on the novella of the same name by Jonathan Ames. From it, Ramsay borrows loose elements of plot: Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is an ex-soldier and ex-FBI agent (as we see in swift sequences so skewering and scalpel-precise they make the word “flashback” feel cumbersome and plodding). He lives with his aging mother (Judith Roberts) in Queens and now makes an off-the-books living as a contract killer, whose specialty is rescuing children from sexual exploitation, by any means necessary and often with quite a bit more force than is strictly required. He is drafted in to rescue Nina, the teenaged daughter (Ekaterina Samsonov) of a politician, who is being kept in a New York brothel, but no sooner does he complete the job, than her father is found dead and she is taken again. But Ramsay has made a film that burns so much brighter and cuts so much deeper than any such story has a right to. Do you remember the first time you saw “Taxi Driver“?

Like in Scorsese’s early masterpiece, Ramsay achieves a kind of uncanny soulmate synergy with her star. Joaquin Phoenix (once again) turns in an effortlessly magnetic performance: bruised and scruffily bearded, his schlubby body covered in scars and his weapon of choice weighing heavy in his hand — this film does more for the destructive and retributive potential of the $17 hardware-store hammer than Park Chan-Wook‘s “Oldboy.” But Phoenix’s turn, despite its semi-archetypal nature, is all about nuance: he is as convincing singing under his breath with his aged mother while they clean cutlery in the living room, as he is administering a chokehold, or performing a water burial that turns into a baptism, or getting spattered with blood after one of the film’s gunshots — the loudest and most startling gunshots in recent memory — pulverizes some guy’s head.

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But then, part of Ramsay’s brilliance as a director is clearly in the collaborators she selects, orchestrating their career-best contributions so that the film vibrates with a unified, choral energy. In particular, it is a showcase for Jonny Greenwood‘s magnificent score: It is sparingly used but when it is, the cues sound more mistake than music, until they resolve into grandly swooping electronica layered over Elmer Bernstein-esque sleazy ’70s percussion, delivering full-body shivers.

And the score is only one aspect of sound design so precise it makes the film’s liquid shifts from visceral to woozy and back again feel organic and elegant. Whispers and half-heard words slither in and out of the mix, often further marked by Nina’s steady internal-monologue countdowns, that are heartbreakingly plausible as a child’s means to dissociate herself from the trauma of her circumstances. And the sound work even, to reference Tarkovsky, sculpts the slender movie further in time: one particular sequence plays out in CCTV footage, with ’60s pop tune “Angel Baby” playing softly throughout, but cutting in sync with the edits like a skipping CD. It unshowily makes us aware of technique and reminds us that edits lie: they seem continuous, but swallow gobbits of time and fling the past into the present, making our impressions untrustworthy.

Elsewhere, low in the mix, an offscreen television burbles the scene from “The Shawshank Redemption” in which Tim Robbins tells Morgan Freeman that the ocean has no memory; two soldiers dance in the desert to Christina Aguilera‘s “Beautiful”; Bon Jovi‘s “Living on a Prayer” strikes up inevitably on a car radio (because it always does) and that’s all before we get the most mordantly hilarious use of Charlene‘s “I’ve Been to Paradise” that there is ever likely to be. Ramsay has a way with a soundtrack cut that is remarkable not just for the song choices she makes, but for the exact moment of the exact song she chooses. It’s one of the ways she ensures her noirish story overspills its genre container and floods into the real world, albeit one fragmented by Joe’s fractured psychology.

READ MORE: Joaquin Phoenix Is Deadly In First Jonny Greenwood Scored Clip From Lynne Ramsay’s  ‘You Were Never Really Here’

The entire, whippet-lean film feels like an experiment in impressionist condensation, as though Ramsay is testing the limits of how little she can give us, and how weird it can be, while still delivering a recognizable revenge thriller. It makes the things she excludes as present as the things she shows us, and sometimes the things she shows us are bizarrely brilliant flourishes. The brutal agent of retribution hellbent on rescuing an underage girl from forced prostitution makes time to observe the way a green jelly bean crinkles into white sugar crystals when crushed between finger and thumb. Joe shoots a man in the stomach and then slaps him in the face with his own tie. An airport drinking fountain flows with no one around; dead people are identified by the soles of their feet; a packet of Birds Eye peas serves as an icepack for the bruises blossoming on Joe’s shoulder (among all its other virtues, DP Thomas Townend‘s cinematography makes wonderful use of the expressive potential of bare backs).

These incidental details, that might more normally be found in a kitchen-sink-drama, sit thrillingly alongside the grisly violence. Often they even collide, as when Joe performs a squirm-inducing feat of self-dentistry in his car after a fight. By the time we arrive at the operatic yet anticlimactic finale, after the hammer literally falls and Joe wanders dazedly through a biblically large mansion (my father’s house has many rooms and all of them contain demons, it seems) it’s clear Ramsay has made something extraordinary, a film that’s both cruel and compassionate, composed of quick, stabbing slivers of insight about how childhood terror can be twisted up with adult compulsion. Because of “Ratcatcher,” “Morvern Callar” and “We Need To Talk About Kevin,” we have always been there for Ramsay, wherever “there” has been. But we were never really here before, and now that we are, one simple request: Can Lynne Ramsay please direct all movies, forever? [A]

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