You Were Never Really Here (2017)
Directed by Lynne Ramsay
A traumatized veteran, unafraid of violence, tracks down missing girls for a living. When a job spins out of control, Joe's nightmares overtake him as a conspiracy is uncovered—leading to what may be his death trip or his awakening.
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46 films that influenced You Were Never Really Here
What critics say influenced You Were Never Really Here
And if nothing else, you can spend its running time recalling better movies it seems to pay tribute to — Taxi Driver, Hardcore, Mona Lisa, The Professional, Oldboy, Drive.
Focusing on a self-appointed vigilante out to save a young girl from the dark underbelly of new York, You Were Never Really Here will inevitably be compared to Taxi Driver, but, while many films have tried and failed to match the achievement of Scorsese’s early masterpiece, this one is good enough to earn the comparison.In both films, the lead performance is key.
It’s a nerve-shredding, artsploitation action picture, with Ramsay mixing and matching elements of Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and John Boorman’s “Point Blank” to create something audaciously all her own.
There are many parallels between Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976).
The collision of sex trafficking and politics spells do-or-die stakes for all involved, and Joe’s maddening underworld descent into the very worst of human nature, where violence is the only language that matters, recalls Paul Schrader’s scripts for Taxi Driver and Hardcore.
Samsonov, whose role (especially paired with Phoenix’s) recalls Jodie Foster’s in “Taxi Driver,” is a heartbreaking Nina, bonded with Joe via PTSD.
It’s a nerve-shredding, artsploitation action picture, with Ramsay mixing and matching elements of Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and John Boorman’s “Point Blank” to create something audaciously all her own.
Aside from Taxi Driver, you might also be reminded of John Boorman’s Point Blank and Luc Besson’s Leon, or perhaps even the Taken films.
You Were Never Really Here is closer in tone to John Boorman’s Point Blank (in its fanatic momentum) or Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (a near-maniac rescues a young girl).
He is also an implacable Walker, a hopped-up Lazarus like the undead protagonist of John Boorman’s Vietnam-era hired-gun hallucination “Point Blank” (1967).
Ramsay is riffing on a whole history of lean, mean, existential crime pictures: a little of the Lee Marvin man-on-a-mission art thriller Point Blank , a little of the nocturnal seductiveness of Drive , even a touch of Steven Soderbergh’s peerlessly cool L.A. revenge yarn The Limey .
The sounds of one scene spill into another, and there’s an efficient fluidity to the way Ramsay mingles Joe’s past with his current endeavors—shades of John Boorman’s Point Blank —but she never really explores Joe’s PTSD in any kind of fulfilling way.
And if nothing else, you can spend its running time recalling better movies it seems to pay tribute to — Taxi Driver, Hardcore, Mona Lisa, The Professional, Oldboy, Drive.
At its best, You Were Never Really Here reminded me of one of the most underrated films of the 1980s, Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa—only without peak Bob Hoskins or Michael Caine or anything more than the rudiments of a plot.
Not for the faint of heart, Ramsay's story of young girls stolen by powerful men nods to other recent powerful works with similar themes, like the 2011 Australian film Sleeping Beauty or the 2013 Israeli thriller Big Bad Wolves, minus their fairy-tale symbolism.
Not for the faint of heart, Ramsay’s story of young girls abducted by powerful men nods to other recent works with similar themes, such as the 2011 Australian film Sleeping Beauty, or the 2013 Israeli thriller Big Bad Wolves (minus their fairy tale symbolism).
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And they’re married to a remarkable score by Jonny Greenwood (fresh off his Oscar nomination for Phantom Thread ) that creates an unbearable atmosphere of mounting dread through electronic tones, percussive beats, natural urban-chaos noise and strident strings—the last of which are clearly modeled after Psycho, another thriller about a devoted son caring for his aged mother which, in fact, is watched by Joe’s mom (with Joe play-acting Norman Bates’ stabbing motions) early on in the film.
Psycho may be playing on the TV in the family home (one of several horror-movie nods), but this mother’s boy is no mere Norman Bates.
He swallows his pain via prescription pills and asphyxiation rituals and cares deeply for his elderly mother (a wonderful Judith Roberts) who we first meet watching Hitchcock's Psycho.
Not for the faint of heart, Ramsay's story of young girls stolen by powerful men nods to other recent powerful works with similar themes, like the 2011 Australian film Sleeping Beauty or the 2013 Israeli thriller Big Bad Wolves, minus their fairy-tale symbolism.
Not for the faint of heart, Ramsay’s story of young girls abducted by powerful men nods to other recent works with similar themes, such as the 2011 Australian film Sleeping Beauty, or the 2013 Israeli thriller Big Bad Wolves (minus their fairy tale symbolism).
And if nothing else, you can spend its running time recalling better movies it seems to pay tribute to — Taxi Driver, Hardcore, Mona Lisa, The Professional, Oldboy, Drive.
There’s a little bit of Jean Reno’s “The Professional” in Joe, and a little bit of Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle from “Taxi Driver” as well.
Drawing on Jonathan Ames’ novella, “You Were Never Really Here” has Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” in its bones, and its bursts of the work of a killer for hire are certainly prefaced by sleek work in Luc Besson’s “The Professional” (1994), the character’s PTSD anticipated by the metallic madness of Lodge Kerrigan’s terse terror, “Clean, Shaven” (1993).
The collision of sex trafficking and politics spells do-or-die stakes for all involved, and Joe’s maddening underworld descent into the very worst of human nature, where violence is the only language that matters, recalls Paul Schrader’s scripts for Taxi Driver and Hardcore.
An angry recluse intent on rescuing a preyed-upon girl from the bowels of sexual-exploitation Manhattan hell—it’s a traditional set-up, part Scorsese’s aforementioned 1976 classic, part Paul Schrader’s 1979 descent-into-porno-depravity, Hardcore.
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In his own way, Phoenix is reminiscent of Harvey Keitel’s anonymous awful cop in Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, only instead of pure id, Joe manifests his trauma as a hulking lump of sentient meat, rage channeled into a new hammer he picks up at a random hardware store during his latest quest to recover a Senator’s daughter (Ekaterina Samsonov).
And the sound work even, to reference Tarkovsky, sculpts the slender movie further in time: one particular sequence plays out in CCTV footage, with ’60s pop tune “Angel Baby” playing softly throughout, but cutting in sync with the edits like a skipping CD.
An antediluvian doo-wop classic, “Angel Baby,” by Rosie and the Originals is used to creepy, taunting effect when Joe eventually metes out righteousness at the brothel.