In You Were Never Really Here (2017) – Lynne Ramsay’s first feature film since 2011 – Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is a freelance hit man with a history of violence. This character archetype is common in Hollywood, from Taxi Driver to Taken: the macho, isolated ex-CIA/ex-FBI/ex-Forces middle-aged man with a dark past and a special set of skills. From this character description, it seems like an unusually cliched choice for Ramsay, who has made her mark with visually arresting, carefully crafted films, including Ratcatcher (1999) and We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011). However, while Ramsay’s subject choice may seem conventional, You Were Never Really Here is anything but, and the film is definitively hers – another installment in a filmic career concerned with representing the repercussions of violence.
The film opens with the sound of heavy breathing: Joe’s laboured breaths as he pulls a plastic bag over his head. Is he using the bag to suffocate himself or to stave off a panic attack? I’d harbour a guess it’s both. You Were Never Really is a sensual, tactile film in which you can feel everything. Close-up shots of the plastic around Joe’s face, alongside the claustrophobic, headache-inducing sound design by Paul Davies, put the viewer in the same bag as their antihero. In the next scene, the camera follows Joe up stairs and out into the street, where he knocks a man out with a headbutt, and then gets in a cab. Everything that flickers across Phoenix’s face in the opening identifies You Were Never Really Here as a character study of a tortured man.
By splicing different time frames and flashbacks into Joe’s experience of living in the present, Ramsay visually depicts how we experience trauma through time and memory. Joe lives with his elderly mother (Judith Roberts) in his childhood home. Happy domestic scenes of mother and son – polishing silver, helping her bathe – are spliced with images of Joe’s childhood in the same house. The boy Joe hides in his bedroom wardrobe while his father abuses his mother, and wraps plastic around his head. Ramsay cuts back to adult Joe doing the exact same thing in the exact same wardrobe, using a circular time to explore the complex nature of his PTSD, its origins in both his abusive childhood and his time overseas in the military. The past encroaches on the present: Joe is repeatedly made to relive his trauma through flashbacks. Ramsay gives the viewer little guidance in these interludes and the kaleidoscope of surreal, violent images disorient us almost as much as they do Joe. And as we witness Joe’s traumatic history with him we are able to understand the ways in which his past has led him to choose his profession as a gun-for-hire who specialises in recovering kidnapped children. He’s assigned a new job: to recover a teenage girl, Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), the daughter of an affluent and ambitious politician (Alex Manette), from a sex-trafficking ring.
It’s during this rescue scene that Ramsay makes a statement about how representations of violence, and pulls the rug out from under the hyper-masculine action genre. When Joe enters the house where Nina and other teenagers are being held, we see what is happening through the house’s CCTV. The violence is shown through grainy security footage – Joe raises a hammer and bodies drop to the ground – and there’s none of the stylised fight scenes or the sort of performative violence we’ve come to expect from Hollywood and the thriller genre. In an interview with The Observer, Ramsay commented on her decision to shoot the film’s pivotal scene as CCTV footage: “In American films you see very expressive violence all the time. Everything on a plate. I wanted to approach it in a different way, to make it exciting and intense but not, you know, sexy and cool… when you get hit with a hammer you’re going to go down quite quickly. There’s no… ballet to it.” The CCTV takes us out of the film, away from Joe, and reminds us that we are voyeurs.
As audiences have become increasingly desensitised to violence – through film, video games, and viral videos – the scene is a statement on how mainstream cinema shoots violence, either for comedy or to give the audience a thrill. In the case of Hollywood’s most famous ultra-violent director, Quentin Tarantino, both of these functions are combined to create grotesque parodies of violence which have neither consequences or ethics. In Django Unchained, the relentless and continual brutality done by white bodies to Black bodies turns slavery into a hyper-stylised video game. As David Denby, for the New Yorker, aptly puts it, “In “Django,” all the atrocities against blacks are staged as viscerally as possible, with lip-smacking emphasis… We’re meant to understand that the violence [in Django Unchained] isn’t “real,” that it’s hyperbolic.” Despite the amount of showy fake gore, violence has become something immaterial in film, without blood, bodies, or consequences. In You Were Never Really Here violence has consequences; for every punch, hammer smack, or gunshot, a body is struck and blown apart. While Ramsay doesn’t flinch away from violence, she is more interested in exploring its consequences: pain and trauma. In a later scene, Joe lies on his kitchen floor beside the man who has just killed his mother and who Joe has just beaten to near-death. As the two men lie together, one waiting for death, they both sing along to a song that comes on the radio, and Ramsay humanises the nameless gunman as he lies terrified and in pain. Rather than show Joe mowing down his enemies, violence is carefully chosen and carefully shown, curated to make a point.
In You Were Never Really Here’s final scene, Joe and Nina, another victim of abuse with a violent history, sip milkshakes in a diner. Brought together by necessity, the characters are mirrors for one another, both having being abused by authority figures. As the two strike up a relationship – that thankfully never tips over into a Leon-style “romance” – it’s apparent Joe needs Nina as much as she needs him. When Nina gets up and walks away, Joe thinks that she’s left him. He takes his gun and blows his brains out. Blood splatters across the table, walls, laminated menus, and a waitress. No one pays any attention to Joe’s suicide and customers continue smiling and ordering food. It’s fantasy, of course, but it’s also a realisation that if he was to kill himself no one would take any notice because blood and death have become part of everyday living – we drink our coffee, eat our pie, and get on with life while wars rage and children are shot down in schools. Ramsay’s talent lies in the way that she enables her audience to become aware of their nature as voyeurs, to see the secret world of violence that surrounds us, which, for the most part, has become invisible in everyday life. When Nina comes back to the table and tells Joe, “it’s a beautiful day,” it’s the beginning of their liberation from meaningless, inconsequential violence. The two walk away, out of the diner, out of frame, and out of their old lives.
