'You Were Never Really Here' A Review

You Were Never Really Here is a thriller about Joe(Joaquin Phoenix) a vigilante for hire who rescues traffiked girls. The film opens on Joe at the completion of a job then follows him back to his home in New York where he struggles to go about his life. He is crippled by PTSD from combat, field work and his own childhood trauma. He lovingly takes care of his aging mother(Judith Roberts) and goes through the motions of his covert work seemingly seeking, each day, a reason to continue. After the rescue of a State Senators daughter Nina(Ekaterina Samsonov) goes awry Joe's life begins to be dismantled by an unknown adversary.

Phoenix gives one of the best performances of his career, devoid of much of his usual mincing tics and explosive emotional panorama writer/director Lynne Ramsay is able to focus him to give a concentrated, staggering, haunting performance. He's able to convey the physical brutality of an action star but with the most complicated and broken history that is constantly creeping into his present. He's able to infer and imply so much feeling and history and is easily the most layered performance of the year-to-date. The other cast members do well, especially Roberts who shares an incredible, magnetic, heartbreaking chemistry with Phoenix, but they are all given little to no time on screen, the entire cast is a distant supporting characters to the lead's psychology.

On paper the film is very much in the vein of the revenge thriller that has become increasingly popular over the past decade since 2008's Taken. But You Were Never Really Here approaches it from such an odd, oblique angle, focusing on all the elements the more cookie-cutter genre fare always ignores and because of that it has a remarkable, palpable freshness. Richly shot, a pounding ominous score, and sharp time-bending editing elevate it beyond the classification of pulp.

Brutal, honest, and captivating.

See It.