'You Were Never Really Here' review: Poetry in motion

You Were Never Really Here (A)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Director: Lynne Ramsay

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Ekaterina Samsonov

The first thing that strikes you about You Were Never Really Here is that this dirty realism movie was made by a woman, Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, she of the We Need to Talk About Kevin fame. Her oeuvre revolves around gritty themes of grief and death, and her distinctive storytelling style leans heavily towards imagery and vivid visual details. You Were Never Really Here, an unflinching look at the dark side, begins with fleeting shots of a man in the throes of pain or death, an image that plays out several times during the film. The opening scenes set the tone for what is to follow: the story of an embattled veteran turned rescuer of missing girls, Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), who isn’t afraid to employ brutality in the pursuit of a higher calling. Every mission he embarks on is an attempt at finding redemption.

Joe is hired by a senator, Albert Votto, to find his missing daughter, Nina. Joe's quest is fruitful, but a surprise turn of events leads him to be separated from Nina, and then several personal tragedies follow. The rest of the movie is about Joe’s journey of coming back from the brink of despair to complete the mission and save Nina, not because he’s accepted the mission, but because he needs that shot at redemption to save himself.

The beauty in You Were Never Really Here lies in the economy of language, as also the elegant nonchalance of the camera that focuses not so much on the brutality, but on the aftereffects of each act of violence and bloodshed. Every task that Joe undertakes is bookended by images of a bulked-up Joaquin Phoenix processing it, his eyes haunted not by the nearness of the act but by the relentlessness of memory. This phantasmagoric exploration of a wounded man’s psyche is deeply meditative on the human condition, reveling now in the fleeting lights of a city by night or a pastoral landscape by day, and a little later in a pool of thick, viscous blood after an episode of violence. In other words, Joe’s devoid-of-life eyes become your lens.

This richness of visual detail is precisely why a movie that is about gore and killing and the dark side of the human spirit is hauntingly evocative. Ramsay layers the storytelling with little moments of levity, darkly comic ones -- little shards of light that offer you escape from the grittiness and the gore and the blood -- that make the viewing experience almost transcendental. Visuals blur in and out of the frame, set against a gritty background score and everyday sounds of the crunch of gravel, creak of a door, rustle of paper, footsteps, traffic, hissing steam, and the tinny note of a grocery store doorbell. Words become, quite simply, unnecessary.

Not that the movie isn’t without flaws. As much as the denouement was satisfying, there was a faint gimmicky halo around it. That this has been adapted from a novella (by Jonathan Ames) perhaps didn’t leave much room to play around in, but the last twenty minutes of the movie don’t feel as earned as I would have liked them to be. But the casting of Joaquin Phoenix seems heaven-ordained. This seems like a natural progression for Phoenix from his turn as a lonesome misanthrope in love with a machine in Her, to playing the walking wounded here in You Were Never Really Here. Never quite the Hollywood poster boy, here is an actor who has sunk his teeth into the roles he’s played, becoming the character he essays on screen each time.

Mesmerizing in its attention to visual detail, this is cinema at its finest. This is poetry in motion, lyricism in imagery, a deeply meditative movie experience, a world where words only serve as cacophony. Stark in its viewpoint at times, and almost hymnal in others, You Were Never Really Here is a celebration of visual storytelling.

You Were Never Really Here has managed only a limited release in Bangalore. Go for a once-in-a-lifetime movie-watching experience.