You Were Never Really Here (2017) Reviews

• Don't wait to see Joker, Joaquin already brought his "A" game!

  FinesseMovieReviews2018-11-14

  Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is a man you hire to track down missing people. Joe is also a skilled ex veteran who is permanently traumatised by his dark past. When Joe works, he walks around with confidence and has no problems using violence in order to get the job done. After getting the job done and collecting his pay, Joe comes home to his elderly mother who he takes care of. After completing a recent job, Joe is soon offered a new mission from a New York senator. The mission is to find and rescue the Senator's 13 year old daughter who may have been captured. I enjoyed the fact that Joe as a character is no 007. It's clear that while he is skilled, he's also a man with a horrible past, but in the end... he is very capable for any task. To the audience, we feel Joe does what he does to distracts himself or perhaps occupy to his thoughts from dwelling on his own personal hell. The film is loaded with tension, but to my surprise it's also all shot beautifully. When Joe is on a mission, we don't do see the smashing and bashing. The director here gives us enough understanding to know what Joe is doing each step of the way without needing to show us every single detail. Other scenes are filmed creatively, allowing us to see Joe's mind and thoughts. These scenes can come across like a dream sequence and viewers might possibly find this slow and boring. Others may lock into what we see of Joe's world and be thankful for how much we get to see of his personal life. For me personally, I loved how creative this film was. Showing different camera angles and Joe's mind in depth only helped me to gain greater understanding of the situation and the characters. Naturally it's these types of moments that also build the suspense! From a performance level I loved Joaquin Phoenix. While I understand the actor has kept himself busy on screen, I personally enjoyed his work here more than anything else I've seen of him recently. The actress of the 13 year old victim (actress Ekaterina Samsonov) also acts incredibly and provides perfect screen chemistry with Joaquin Phoenix's character. I personably enjoyed seeing these two work together as the story built up. Overall, I found this film rather surprising in a positive way. The film is dark, gritty and loaded with tension as it progresses, but we also gain a greater understanding to Joe's thoughts and his mind. We are given plenty of creative detail thanks to the awesome work from the director. That being said, I feel many will enjoy the film's creativity while others might start to look at their watch during the film. For me, I loved it, and it was great to see something new and fresh in 2018 with yet another solid performance from actor Joaquin Phoenix. Worth a look! 8.2/10

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• Joaquin Phoenix is at his best

  hashimoto32142018-10-31

  Please beware there may be spoilers. I was moved by this movie. As others have said certain aspects seemed weak, the plot for example. The story however was so strong and so badly needed to be told. Phoenix gave such a passionate, all or nothing performance that honestly this is one of my favorite films of his as far as the artistry and acting. He connects so strongly with the young girl that its palpable on the screen. This felt so incredibly real, without the fluff that seems to usually come with these types of movies. Injuries seemed realistic, the pain of the characters, the agony of the story. All in all give it a watch if you can handle the subject matter

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• You Were Never Really Here

  arminbilefield2018-04-08

  Contains Spoilers: What a beautiful piece of art, the good goes against evil in this film. The good being Joe and the bad being a lot of other people. The film has a lot of similarities with Taxi Driver, but while it carries the similarities with itself, it delivers it's own original identity in a flawless way. Lynne Ramsay's script put together with Joaquin Phoenix's performance and Johnny Greenwood's absolutely superb soundtrack, delivers to you one of the most beautiful movies of the decade, for your own and this movie's sake don't jump to conclusions with this one and give it time; for me the movie really took life in the water sequence where Joe tries to commit suicide while drowning his mom's body, but as he is in the middle of drowning he suddenly sees Nina, drowning with him. Noticing that drowning himself would automatically drown Nina too, since she has nobody to save her, and thinking she isn't strong enough to do it herself. He goes back for Nina, he kills the security guards goes inside but sees that Nina saved herself, what he may not notice at that moment was that he was the one who gave her the power to fight back and save herself, but he thinks that he just added another not-so pleasant event to the girls life making her kill someone but she assures him "It's okay Joe, it's okay". Because Joe might not notice it but Nina seems to notice that Joe is a nice guy, actually he is a sweetheart, he holds the hand of the guy that killed her mom when he's dying and is scared, for christ's sake. Both leaves the house not knowing after all of this disturbing events will they be able to just get on with their lives? that thought is seen in the diner, where Joe shoots himself in the head while shedding two tears (a reverse type of De Niro's famous scene at the end of the Taxi Driver where he has a smile on his face a few moments before his death). If the movie ended there, Ramsay would imply that in between all of this darkness there is no brightness, it can't be found. But the movies tricks you, with Nina coming back we understand that Joe's asleep and that scene was simply just a dream, and with Nina's dialogue "Let's go, It's a beautiful day" Joe wonders, maybe it is a beautiful day, maybe he can put the disturbing past of his childhood with his abusive dad and the incidents of his work away. And when he sees that even if there is all of this darkness in this world you can still see the light, because you are the one who has the power and you are the one who chooses and understands without all of this darkness, the brightness would not have any meaning; and he confirms Nina, "It is a beautiful day outside" creating one of the most beautiful endings of cinema. . . . . . . . EDIT: But you know what, that incestuous theory makes sense too...

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• Incredible performances and cinematography, but has a weak uninteresting plot

  Deathstep302018-04-10

  I'm a huge fan of art films. This film is definitely inspired by taxi driver and that's one of the reasons why it caught my attention as I love that movie, but this film is a huge let down. It's not good. The acting is 10/10, the cinematography and camerawork is 10/10, but the plot is horrible and boring. Take blade runner 2049's slow (but awesome) pacing and slow it down, throw in an uninteresting predictable repetitive recycled plot we've seen a billion times which could have been told within 20 minutes, give the main character psychological traumatic issues and show us random crap that's going on in his mind, and you have this movie. It brings nothing new to the table and is done in a way that simply bores you. I love dramas, I know this movie is one, an art drama film, but there Wonder, no suspense, no clever conversations, no anything really. I felt like I was watching a long video demonstrating Joaquin Phoenix's phenomenal acting. In a nutshell this film is a drama with your typical basic story line with phenomenal acting that you will forget within a couple of days. I can only recommend it if love movies with beautiful cinematography and are a huge fan of Joaquin Phoenix, but if you're looking for an original unforgettable drama, a crime revenge film, or whatever else you were expecting, I recommend staying away from this.

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• Not what it appears

  FrostyChud2017-11-29

  If you thought this was a film about a disturbed loner avenging an innocent, you got snookered. The only way to understand YWNRH is through a Freudian lens. The theme of this film is not father-daughter incest as it appears, but rather mother-son incest. Joe has an incestuous relationship with his mother. "Stay with me a little longer," she says when he puts her to bed. In the next scene, she is trying to cajole him into coming into the bathroom where she is naked. The multiple references to PSYCHO are not a coincidence: this too is the story of a man transformed into a serial murderer by his obscene mother. The story proper is nothing is a paranoid delusion: hence the title of the film and the mysterious "invisibility" of the main character. The true story: Joe, as a child, is dragged into an incestuous relationship by his mother. His father, whose job ought to be to prevent this regressive fusion, does not have the authority to separate them. He is too violent, too weak, or too absent: we never find out. All we ever see of him is a hand holding a hammer. This scene must be understood as a metaphor. Father discovers their relationship and explodes; as he rages impotently with his hammer, mother and son exchange a complicit glance under the bed. Translation of the mother's wink: "He's impotent. You're still MINE." On mother's credenza is a photo of her as a young and beautiful woman and a photo of her son. Father has been eliminated from the picture. Joe rescues abused girls. This is a fantasy. No abused girl ever existed, only an abused boy. Joe invents the story of a girl abused by her father as a displacement of the true abuse: a boy by his mother. What actually happens in the movie, and what is fantasy? What actually happens is very simple. Joe murders his mother. Joe commits suicide. Perhaps the homosexual encounter in the sauna and the drugs are true. Everything else is a delusion that he creates to escape from the horror of the truth. In Joe's fantasy, he is a powerful man and not a victim. He has a benevolent father figure (McCleary). He makes ample use of the hammer which appears to be the only trace of a paternal legacy. The Nina character is how Joe sees his mother: as a beautiful, innocent, prohibited object of desire. Joe's delusion is simultaneously an attempt to understand the truth and an attempt to flee the truth. David Lynch uses this technique more explicitly in LOST HIGHWAY, MULHOLLAND DRIVE, and TWIN PEAKS. It is very effective on film and Lynne Ramsay is right to exploit it. In Joe's delusion, the father (represented by the two- dimensional Votto and Williams characters) takes "illegal" possession of his daughter. In reality, this is how the young Joe perceives his father's possession of his mother: as an unbearable crime that must be punished. Did Joe murder his own father? It is possible. Note that in all of Joe's traumatic flashbacks, women are being murdered, not men. These flashbacks are not real. They are irruptions of Joe's deepest fantasy: murder his mother. He never went to Iraq. One day, like Ed Kemper, Joe finally kills his mother. He is the one who shot her in the head. To exculpate himself, he flees into an unbelievable political conspiracy fantasy in which all symbolic fathers are pedophile criminals. Why is Joe so protective of his mother's privacy? Because he doesn't want anyone to find out what is going on between them. I wasn't sure the director understood her own story until the moment she replaced Joe's sinking mother with Nina. Here she could not be clearer: Nina is just a fantasy screen for Mother. In reality, Joe really does shoot himself in the diner. The fantasy of a happy future with Nina is just a screen. I have read Jonathan Ames before and the theme of maternal incest is often implied (his fascination for transsexuals is further proof of an Oedipal thematic). Good movie.

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