You Were Never Really Here review: A self-conscious vigilante thriller with echoes of Taxi Driver

The elliptical style may add to the sense of mystery but it also leaves far too many questions unanswered

Dir Lynne Ramsay, 90 mins, starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Ekaterina Samsonov, Alessandro Nivola, Alex Manette, John Doman, Judith Roberts

Lynne Ramsay is a brilliant director – and that is the problem. In her latest feature, You Were Never Really Here, every scene appears intended to draw attention to her own ingenuity This is a self-conscious vigilante thriller which has clear echoes of Point Blank, Hardcore and Taxi Driver.

Adapted by Ramsay from Jonathan Ames’s novella of the same name, it has a central character, Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), whose vision of reality is distorted by the painkillers he takes. The blurred and fractured storyline reflects his very fuzzy state of mind.

Ramsay continually startles us with the beauty of her imagery. This beauty, though, is very incongruous considering the violence and squalid nature of the subject matter. She also can’t film a traffic jam, a waiting room, a back alley or even a shot of someone eating a jelly bean without trying to give it a lyrical dimension.

The bloodiest scenes here always have a dream-like quality. Instead of showing us a fight directly, Ramsay will film it reflected on a mirror on a ceiling. If someone is shot in the head, she’ll find time to show us a poignant close up of the victim’s blood-smeared spectacles.

The most apocalyptic sequence in the movie – reminiscent of Travis Bickle’s assault on the brothel at the end of Taxi Driver – is shown through surveillance cameras. This has a distancing effect and makes it seem as if we are watching an old silent movie.

Joaquin Phoenix is a Janus-faced actor who can convey lightness and charm (as he did in Spike Jonze’s Her) but who can also seem brooding and truculent. Here, as the private investigator Joe, he looks like a bulkier version of Charles Manson, a bearded figure in a hoodie.

He may dress like a hobo but he is ex-military and is very brutal indeed when it comes to the fight scenes. He takes a grim but obvious pleasure in using his hammers and guns to inflict as much pain as he can on the villains. He is also tormented.

We know as much from the elliptical flashbacks to scenes of him as a child, hiding away from an abusive father. Ramsay throws in constant scenes of asphyxiation and drowning. On every level, Joe is struggling for air.

The plot involves Joe’s efforts to track down the teenage daughter of a politician. Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov) has been abducted, drugged and sold off into sexual slavery. She’s the equivalent to the Jodie Foster character in Taxi Driver.

Samsonov plays her in eerily detached fashion, a child so used to the monstrous behaviour of the adults around her that she has blanked out her emotions. Getting her back isn’t just a job for Joe. It is a full-blown moral crusade.

Ramsay pays lip service to private eye movie conventions. The film has its share of corrupt cops, crooked and lecherous politicians and sudden, Chandler-like, narrative twists. Its storytelling is deliberately very oblique indeed.

Subliminal flashbacks are thrown continually into the mix but Ramsay leaves it to the audience to puzzle out what exactly is going on. It also very quickly becomes apparent that the film is more concerned with character than with plot. The real mystery here isn’t who kidnapped Nina or why; it is what happened to Joe to leave him in such a fragile state.

Amid all the gloom, You Were Never Really Here has some lighter, more playful interludes. Many of these hinge on Joe’s relationship with his elderly mom (Judith Roberts), with whom he lives. He dotes on her but she drives him to distraction.

It’s not just her habit of sitting terrified in front of the television, watching re-runs of Psycho, that irks him. It’s the fact that she hasn’t cleared out her fridge in decades. Food is in there that passed its sell-by date years before.

Ramsay also has the ability to include humour and tenderness at the least likely moments imaginable. For example, two bloody, battered figures who’ve just been trying to kill one another are shown holding hands and crooning together as they lie on the floor, listening to kitsch Seventies pop anthem, “I’ve Never Been To Me” (with its bizarre lyrics about “crying for unborn children”).

Maybe it’s the drugs that Joe is taking but it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between what is actually happening and what are his drug-fuelled fantasies. Exquisitely shot underwater footage gives the film an unlikely mythical feel, as if Joe is a contemporary equivalent to an Arthurian knight, looking for redemption, or a prophet trying to baptise a sinner.

Ramsay also includes a ghoulish late scene in a diner in which a massacre seems to take place – and then we discover it may just be happening in the imagination of one of the main characters.

After so many testosterone-driven revenge thrillers, it is refreshing to encounter a film which takes such an idiosyncratic and personal approach. We are a very long way from the world of Michael Winner’s Death Wish. Ramsay creates many memorable images and evokes a disorienting atmosphere. We see events as if from Joe’s bleary perspective.

It’s the storytelling that feels flimsy and contrived. The narrative never picks up momentum. The filmmakers deliberately withhold information about such matters as what exactly happened to Joe in his childhood and what drives the sleazy and violent behaviour of Governor Williams and his associates.

The elliptical style may add to the sense of mystery but it also leaves far too many questions unanswered.

You Were Never Really Here hits UK cinemas 9 March.