By Emilio Frenk.
Director: Lynne Ramsay
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Ekaterina Samsonov, Alex Manette, John Doman, Judith Roberts, Frank Pando and Alessandro Nivola
Rating: Excellent.
Scottish Filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, brings “You Were Never Really Here”, her fourth film which brings outstanding results.
Based on the novel by Jonathan Ames, the movie centers in Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) a combat veteran and former FBI Agent who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder who tracks missing girls for a living.
Everything will change for Joe when he is asked to rescue Nina Votto (Ekaterina Samsonov) a girl who happens to be the daughter of a New York Senator. After she rescues Nina, Joe will be in the middle of a conspiracy where politicians are involved and can lead him to his death unless he rescues Nina.
“You Were Never Really Here” is both a drama and thriller with an interesting subject in this case from someone who suffers from PTSD. The approach that Ramsay took on this film was very interesting and she wrote a brilliant screenplay.
You can tell that Ramsay did her research on people who suffer PTSD, where she took it to another direction and made it in a character that is in this case a bounty hunter.
Normally in films that we see our main character suffering from Post Traumatic Disorder they are trying to deal with their emotions and basically that´s it. Here in this case the character of Joe is very complete since he is trying to deal with this situation, but at the same time he is very determined on what he does.
Joaquin Phoenix in this film again he is incredible and delivers a fantastic performance. This performance lead him to win Best Actor at last year´s Cannes Film Festival and we can see why.
I noticed in “You Were Never Really Here” influences in films like “Taxi Driver” by Martin Scorsese and “Drive” by Nicolas Winding Refn since the main characters are very similar to Joe. Also the tone and the darkness of the previously mentioned films are very similar to this one.
Lynne Ramsay did an outstanding job in her directing. Like in her films like “We Need to Talk About Kevin”, “Morvern Callar” and “Ratcatcher” Ramsay goes deep in Joe and show him as a very vulnerable character that he is dealing with a Post Traumatic disorder.
Normally I am not a big fan of using flashbacks but the way how they were used in this film works and it´s the way that they should be used in film, in this case to understand the origin of the major conflict the character has.
I admire a filmmaker like Lynne Ramsay who has shown us how brave she is in making a movie this intense since you normally see male filmmakers doing this kind of films and she did an outstanding job.
Johnny Greenwood´s score is also key to this film since it make a huge contribution, specially to the most critical scenes in this film where his music plays a major role.
One other thing that I really liked in “You Were Never Really Here” is the fact that Joaquin Phoenix´s character doesn´t talk to much and he doesn´t need to since we know what is going on in his head the whole time.
The intensity of this film it could be too much and before you watch I encourage you to be prepared and specially open since it has very graphic violence in it.
“You Were Never Really Here” is so far one of the best films of 2018, Joaquin Phoenix delivers again and Lynne Ramsay´s both her direction and screenplay are fantastic. I highly recommend for the elements that I just mentioned and again be prepared to watch this film since it´s very violent and intense.