You Were Never Really Here, the new film from Scottish director Lynne Ramsay, stars Joaquin Phoenix. It’s a terrific performance, a starkly physical turn from an actor most associated with states of tortured introspection (although there’s much of that in the film too).
Joe, the character he plays, is beefed up impressively; scars ripple his meaty upper shoulder, and he sports a wiry-bush beard and grey straggly locks pulled into a greasy ponytail. I’m not sure what profession Joe would check in a drop-down menu on an online application for a credit card (note: he’s a cash-only kind of guy). But his work involves a lot of beating people up. He’s hired muscle expected to apply violent force.
The bulk of the film involves a job he signs on for with an ambitious senator, whose young daughter Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov) has been kidnapped for repeated abuse by a Manhattan paedophile ring. The senator wants Joe to retrieve Nina and to hurt the men who captured and continue to torment her. He mentions that he’s heard Joe can be “brutal”. Joe, dead eyes staring straight ahead, his voice a murmur, says: “I can be”.
Indeed he can. Utilising the preferred instrument of his trade, a hammer bought in a downtown DIY store (on which the phrase Made in the USA has been prominently stamped, alerting us to the possible state-of-the-nation vibes to the storm of violence that Joe carries with him), he proceeds to gain access to this gruesome child prostitution den and demolish sundry clients and security personnel with strategic and gruesome blows to the head.
Joe is a kind of avenging angel, clutching a bloodied hammer and pumped up to the eyes on painkillers, patrolling the neon-lit streets of New York
There is more brutality to come, when Joe realises he’s been set up by sinister forces connected to the senator, and Nina is recaptured by a powerful figure whose identity Joe seeks to uncover. This mission acquires a personal edge when those closest to Joe are killed by the kidnappers, and Joe determines to rescue Nina, a kind of avenging angel, clutching a bloodied hammer and pumped up to the eyes on painkillers, patrolling the neon-lit streets of New York.