‘You Were Never Really Here’
Directed by Lynne Ramsay
Starring Joaquin Phoenix
Rated R
Playing at Angelika Film Center, AMC Loews Lincoln Square
Joaquin Phoenix has found the perfect filmmaker for his talents in Lynne Ramsay, an impressionistic master.
In “You Were Never Really Here,” which plays like “Taken” as it might have been re-imagined by, say, Vincent van Gogh, Ramsay captures the animalistic quality inherent in all of Phoenix’s work with a degree of exacting, vivid attention that makes your heart ache.
The actor plays Joe, a veteran stricken with PTSD who is hired by clients to rescue trafficked girls. The movie follows his efforts to find the daughter of a New York politician, with the plot in its most basic form advancing in a familiar fashion.
Of course, the particulars hardly matter. Set to a haunting, synth-heavy Jonny Greenwood score, beginning with the protagonist asphyxiating himself in a plastic bag and continuing through a series of jarring disconnected images, the movie constitutes an existential cry of despair.
A hush lingers over the movie, which trades in an extreme misery without a promise of escape or release.
Phoenix engages with this part in the sort of all-consuming fashion that’s only possible when an actor buys comprehensively into a director’s vision.
His Joe is deeply, fundamentally anguished, wholly defined by the omnipresent darkness that has overcome him, and the actor sheds any semblance of caution or vanity to go to that harrowing place.
Whether in expansive tracking shots or blood-splattered close-ups, on lonely nighttime drives through rain-swept Manhattan streets or while carrying out vengeance, the focus never wavers.
