You Were Never Really Here is a hypnotic and thrilling crime drama that doesn’t let you go until the credits begin to roll.
A third of the way through the breezy 90-minute running time of You Were Never Really Here, essentially director Lynne Ramsey’s arthouse version of Taken, Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) lays down next to a hitman he has just shot. As “I’ve Never Been To Me” plays in the background, the two men lay side by side. The hitman extends his hand to Joe and they lay on the floor singing along.
It’s an odd moment of humanity in a movie filled with inhuman behavior and something you’d never see in another crime thriller. Ramsey, who broke out in 2011 with We Need to Talk About Kevin, isn’t interested in the violence aspect of the story, though there is plenty of it. Instead, she focuses on the characters and specifically Joe’s internalized struggle with his past.
The plot is quite simple, unlike movies with similar premises. Joe is a hired gun who tracks down kidnapped children. His handler John McCleary (John Doman) delivers him a new job to track down the kidnapped daughter (Ekaterina Samsonov) of a New York State Senator.
However, the job quickly spirals out of control. That’s really all there is to it. But Ramsey doesn’t let a single minute go wasted. It’s tense from beginning to end, save for a few tender scenes with Joe’s mother (a great Judith Roberts).
There are a lot of scenes of violence, but Ramsey doesn’t glorify it. In one of the most stunning sequences, Ramsey tracks Joe through a house via surveillance cameras after he takes down guard after guard. It’s brutal, but not over-the-top as the camera gives us a detached view from it.
As we cycle through various views from the cameras, we hear the croon of “I Wouldn’t Dream of It” through the halls. The sound design is impeccable with both diegetic and non-diegetic sounds. Much of what we see is internalized within Joe, but at moments the line is blurred.
Phoenix has never been better. Joe is haunted by the moments in his past that we only see in brief flashes—him as a child hiding in the closet, his mother cowering under a table. The violence of his past invades the violence that he is committing in the present. However, the violence of his present is justified. At least, that’s how he gets through it. Without much goading,
You Were Never Really Here doesn’t write a new song, but Lynne Ramsey performs it beautifully. Jonny Greenwood, after composing one of the best scores of the century for Phantom Thread, goes for a more fragmented approach here to great effect.
It’s an art piece through and through, but also riveting and thrilling throughout. The second it ended I wanted to start watching it again and
You Were Never Really Here is now streaming on Prime Video. It is also rent and buy on Amazon.
Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.
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