You Were Never Really Here

YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE   ***

Lynne Ramsay

2017

IDEA:  A psychologically scarred army veteran and ex-FBI officer acts as a hired gun to save girls from sex trafficking.

BLURB:  Lynne Ramsay possesses a distinctively oblique, poetic film grammar that is thrilling both for its exquisite, unorthodox formalism and for the affects it produces. Her images, often impressionistic close-ups untethered to establishing shots or contextualizing juxtapositions, combine with densely layered soundscapes to create unpredictable and visceral sensations that obtain before the intervention of narrative. This is a syntax informed by the associative logic of memory and dreams, a fragmentary flow of sensory information that antecedes signification or else acts to repeatedly puncture it. In You Were Never Really Here, Ramsay exploits the disruptive and shocking potentials of this language to express the trauma of the Real that perpetually irrupts into her protagonist’s tenuous existence. Even when Joe, played as an ungainly, battered beast of a man by Joaquin Phoenix, is not engaged in his murderous routine, the violence and death that mark his past surface as destabilizing reminders of the trauma he’s desperately trying to exorcise. Ramsay signals their threat in jarring cuts and discordant acoustic arrangements: normally innocuous images and sounds come to induce as much unease as the frequent splashes of ruby blood when collocated through the director’s disorienting audiovisual rhythms, generating a cold-sweat state of anticipation compounded by the vicious thrum of Jonny Greenwood’s score. You Were Never Really Here’s highly aestheticized representation of PTSD, among other thorny subjects, runs the risk of fetishizing or abstracting, but Ramsay is a shrewd filmmaker who knows how to avoid crass spectacle. Even when her technique feels indulgent, its evocative results speak for themselves.