You Were Never Really Here - review by Alison Rowat

Runtime: 90 minutes

WHEN first we meet the anti-hero of Scots director Lynne Ramsay’s thriller he is engaged in auto-erotic asphyxiation and shortly after bins a bible. It is safe to assume that should you go to see You Were Never Really Here, the trailers beforehand, specially tailored to your viewing choices as cinema voiceover guy says, will not include the new Mary Poppins movie.

Violent, provocative, and disturbing, Ramsay’s picture is as bleak as a freshly dug grave.

Yet curiously, if you can get beyond all that, one leaves the cinema feeling better, or slightly more hopeful, about the world. Nice trick if a director and star can pull it off, and Ramsay and Joaquin Phoenix can. Well, almost.

The star of Walk the Line and Her plays Joe. As with everything in Ramsay’s 90 minute movie, which in turn is adapted from Jonathan Ames’ equally terse 92 page novella, the audience is left to join the dots as to who Joe is, where he has been, and what he does now.

The latter is clear enough: Joe finds and returns girls and young women who have been kidnapped by sex traffickers. Think of Joe as a sort of scruffy Jack Reacher working in the depths of hell.

Joe’s work as an avenging angel for hire requires that he stay under the radar, taking every precaution not to be identified lest anyone come after him, or the person he is really worried about, the elderly mother with whom he lives (played by Judith Roberts of Eraserhead, Orange is the New Black).

Once he has found out where the girl he is looking for has been hidden, Joe takes a practical, no nonsense, Hobbesian attitude to the task in hand. His preferred MO is to get into the building, get out his hammer, set about the bad guys and leave with the victim. Job done, cash paid, Joe goes home to mother.

READ MORE: LYNNE RAMSAY ON RETURNING TO GLASGOW TO LIVE

His latest assignment comes from a Senator whose daughter Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov) has been taken. It seems like another straightforward job, as much as any vigilante operation involving extreme violence and huge risk can be straightforward, but this assignment, Joe soon learns, is not going to be like the others.

The echoes of Taxi Driver are unmistakable but that is where any resemblance ends. As far as story goes, Taxi Driver is War and Peace compared to Ramsay’s back of an envelope plot. From the few breadcrumbs thrown by the director of Ratcatcher and We Need to Talk About Kevin, we see Joe’s childhood was nothing to write cheery letters home about. We know he is physically fit, and scarred, suggesting a military veteran. From the scenes with his mother, we appreciate he is a good son, albeit one who feels the burden of caring. But that is about it.

With so little to go on, You Were Never Really Here is less a tearalong thriller and more of a slow burn mood piece, with Ramsay keeping things as simple as possible so that she can concentrate on a few set piece scenes. Of these, the ones with Joe looking after his mother are the most impressive: beautifully drawn, tender, and bleakly funny.

On occasion, though, Ramsay tries too hard to be devilishly quirky. There is such a thing as being too cool for school, even for arthouse movies about hammer killers.

READ MORE: LYNNE RAMSAY ON RETURNING TO GLASGOW TO LIVE

With not much in the way of a story or characters other than Joe, it is left to Phoenix to drive the picture forward and keep us intrigued, and he is the perfect star for the job. Indeed, he may be the only actor who could say so little yet convey so much. Phoenix is a master at troubled souls. Here, buried under a bushy beard, baseball cap and hoodie, he is even more of an enigma on which audiences can project whatever they want. Adding further to the movie’s hipster credentials is an Oscar-nominated score from Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead.

As with Tilda Swinton in We Need to Talk About Kevin, Ramsay invests a lot in her choice of lead and it pays off. It takes a strong director to take that kind of punt, and Ramsay has always been that. When everything works, as in the final scene of You Were Never Really Here, we can see just how brilliant, original, and world class a director this Glaswegian can be.