Movie Review: Joaquin Phoenix Hammers It Home in the Stunning "You Were Never Really Here"

It’s hammer time.

You’ll be hard pressed to find a better first five minutes to a movie this year than the seemingly disconnected series of nightmarish images that open You Were Never Really Here.

A mysterious man (whom we later learn goes by the name Joe yet we immediately recognise as Joaquin Phoenix in beaten-down and bearded mode) endures flashbacks to a troubling tragedy, washes off fresh blood in a hotel room and disposes of a hammer, jewellery and a photo of a young girl. Outside, a “Do Not Disturb” sign hangs on the door. Too late.

The discordant score wriggles to life, and it’s not superhero music, but something like it. At an airport, Joe makes a call: “It’s done.” If you’re not in then, you never will be, and that’s why cinemas have doors.

Leaving the theatre, however, will mean abandoning one of 2018’s most compelling and complicated features, as well as one of its most purely satisfying, on both a technical and emotional level.

If I really wanted to put the hard sell on readers, I'd call You Were Never Really Here an artsy fartsy Taken, and it wouldn’t even be a backhanded compliment. Do you want to see Joaquin Phoenix, hammer in hand, murder child abductors, while director Lynne Ramsay plunges him into a sonic hellscape, leanly adapting a Jonathan Ames potboiler and keeping both their weird comic streaks? Because here it is.

Retelling the plot would be largely pointless, because Ames’ already short novella has been reduced to a bare skeleton by Ramsay, and even still, some essential narrative dots remain unmapped. In a fashion typical to the genre, Joe’s hitman routine (depicted in that early scene) is upended by an operation gone wrong, when the recovery of a senator’s daughter (Ekaterina Samsonov) sinks him into a political conspiracy. At the end of the picture, Joe makes a leap of logic to find the big bad culprits that doesn’t entirely track, but you go with it, because we were never really here for the mystery anyway.

We came for beautiful moments, including an underwater burial, alongside unbearably violent ones, such as a hammer-time attack on a child sex ring seen only through CCTV. It’s sad and stunning and stressful and sometimes so darkly funny you actually wonder if you’ve dropped into another filmic world where such things can intermingle. Ramsay has said she would like to make a superhero movie or a comedy next, yet doesn’t get asked. Here, she basically does both, while remaining herself.

Her collaborators are doing the same. Jonny Greenwood’s score is so Radiohead it sounds like an imitation, especially given the more abstract route Paul Thomas Anderson has let him travel. Still, who would complain about an instrumental Radiohead album playing over a grimy revenge tale?

It’s Phoenix’s truly tortured performance as the spring-coiled loner with a violent streak that lingers above all. It’s not simply that his killer Joe has a conscience—it’s that he seems to have a shared consciousness with all abused children, and when we met him, the toll is already too much. The only benefit to his grisly profession is he gets to serve as protector. When Joe discovers one of his charges has had to do his job for him, he’s crushed. The only fate worse than the one he’s rescuing the children from, is his own.

5/5

You Were Never Really Here plays the Revelation Perth International Film Festival until 15 July and the Melbourne International Film Festival from 2 August. It is opens in Australian cinemas 6 September.