Lynne Ramsay is one of those exciting directors whose every project is more visually engaging than the one before. She would rather make independent films on a shoestring (Morvern Callar, Ratcatcher) than compromise her own artistic integrity on a big studio production (Jane Got A Gun, which Ramsay was due to direct but backed down upon finding out that she didn’t have full control of the project). With only a handful of films under her belt, she’s managed to establish herself as one of the most exciting British directors of the last twenty years. You Were Never Really Here is based on a spy novella by Jonathan Ames, but goes further into film noir territory to unravel the layers of trauma experienced by the main character, former FBI agent Joe, played by Joaquin Phoenix.
You’ll be excused if you find yourself comparing this film with Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. The plots are similar, but Ramsay is not a filmmaker that tries to copy other directors’ styles or stories. With You Were Never Really Here, her focus is less on the how, and more on the why. That question will slowly take us down the rabbit hole and into Joe’s damaged mind. The how remains nonetheless paramount in shaping Joe’s character. Here the noir takes a different shape. The darkness of Scorsese’s New York streets becomes the darkness of Joe’s hoodie, his blood-soaked beard, his traumatized walk. How Joe goes about delivering his vengeance upon those who take advantage of underage girls is yet another way Ramsay manages to define her antihero.
Joe, played with quiet intensity and meaningful grunts by a stocky-yet-fragile Phoenix, is a hired gun who kills the people he’s after with a hammer. After the deed is done, he goes home to his elderly mother (played with cheeky frailty and precious defiance by Judith Roberts), with whom he has a loving relationship. He cares for her with silent devotion and almost saintly patience.
The film starts in complete darkness with a whispered countdown and Joe’s gasps for air. The next moment he’s seen with a plastic bag over his head. What is the countdown to? Suicide or awakening? Joe has made this suicide attempt a part of his daily routine. He teeters between life and death, living with the dead and dying with the living ever since childhood when his trauma began.
Joe’s trauma is twofold. As a child, he experienced domestic violence at the hands of his father. He’s also seen his mother abused in front of him. There are recurrent sound fragments, shards of explanations for Joe’s trauma. Some are of Joe’s father (“must do better”, “stand up straight, don’t slouch”). Others are just Joe’s own echoes of afflictions suffered (“what the fuck are we doing?”).
As he spends the days alone in his bedroom, glimpses of his experience in the army are revealed to the audience in a haunting way. A shot of a bare foot in the sand, twitching as life is snuffed out of the body disrupts a silent scene of Joe sitting on the side of the bed, apparently looking out of the window. Cinematographer Thomas Townend manipulates the light falling on Phoenix’s face in a way that complements the latter’s almost inscrutable facial expression. Joe tries to sit straight but his breathing is heavy. He remains still as he looks out the window. The whole composition looks like a painting of solitude and peace. Except there is no peace for Joe. His torment is quiet but incessant.
During pre-production, Ramsay sent Phoenix a sound tape with recorded fireworks and gunshots to help explain what Joe hears in his head all the time and shape Phoenix’s performance. Behind his apparent peace and quietude, a noisy hell of trauma lies, potentially silenced briefly by the acts of violence he commits. This is perfectly replicated in Jonny Greenwood’s exquisite score, which at times feels like another character in the story.
Both the diegetic and non-diegetic music add to the already jarring cinematic style, mirroring Joe’s inner turmoil. Greenwood’s score guides the audience through Joe’s labyrinthine journey towards life on the other side of trauma. The diegetic songs, mostly joyful and lighthearted, provide a contrast between Joe’s inner anguish and the indifferent world in which Joe wanders like a ghost.
Joe’s thoughts are betrayed by his body movements, especially the hunched shoulders, weighed down by his father’s harsh words constantly echoing in his ears. Phoenix acts with his back and his shoulders as much as with his enthrallingly expressive face. He doesn’t need to say much, as Ramsay’s camera and the brilliant editing are offering the audience enough to work with. One must put the pieces back together and solve the mystery of Joe’s torment, for this is not easy viewing.
A pivotal moment is when we see Joe sing at the public sauna. As he washes his face, he looks in the mirror and starts to sing the same song he sang with his mother earlier.. Only this time it has a much sinister connotation, marked by a detached, almost inhuman grin in the mirror. This song allows Joe to turn from dutiful son into ferocious assassin, the merciless killer who will not hesitate to stick his hammer in somebody’s skull if that somebody has been operating a child kidnapping ring. The visit to the sauna comes right before his next rescue mission: saving Senator Votto’s 13-year-old daughter, Nina. Joe looks in the mirror and grins a most chilling and frightening grin. This presents a different Joe, the one mother would not like to see. The whys are becoming clearer now. The family trauma is the driving force towards him looking after his mother. The war trauma pushes him towards rescuing underage girls kidnapped and forced into prostitution. Through the new hum of the song, the family trauma makes way for the war trauma.
Filmmakers who understand the cinematic medium, how it reflects human nature and its sophistications, will know how to use props with a meaning. Take the mirror for instance: “A look into the mirror necessitates a confrontation with one’s own face as the window to one’s own interior self. Yet this look at oneself in the mirror is also a look from outside, a look that no longer belongs to me, that judges or forgives me, criticizes or flatters me, but at any rate has become the look of another, or “the Other.”
How does Ramsay employ the mirror motif? She associates it with song. Joe’s singing happens at important moments in the film. These moments are not what drives the plot forward. The singing brings understanding to Joe’s character. The mirror scene, right before his rescue operation, comes as an out of place moment in Joe’s journey. It is a moment in which Joe lets the guard down. He goes to a public sauna, frequented by men who look a bit menacing, perhaps living on the fringes of society like him. The audience doesn’t know where the sauna is. One can only assume it is a safe place for Joe.
Joe sings in the mirror, feeling at home. He is topless. Joe’s body is Guernica, screaming with scars, torment, and the agony of living through hell. The scars are screaming from every contour of Joe’s body, yet he is singing. He looks in the mirror, singing, mumbling about the beauty of someone who’s a feather in his arms. He is intent on saving those physically weaker than him, like his mother and 13-year-old Nina. The peaceful love song performed in the mirror is the perfect metaphor for Joe. In appearance, a calm guy, ready to perform the most gruesome tasks. The scars are the silent witnesses to what Joe has had to live through all his life. There is screaming, but only Joe can hear it. While he ties his shaggy unkempt hair, Joe grins in the mirror. Joe grins to show the audience he is ready for anything that’s lurking out there. Whatever is lurking out there can’t be worse that what’s lurking behind Joe’s eyes. The gunshots, the screams, the dying, the dead, the decaying. Only Joe can understand the layers of trauma buried under the appearance of normality or inconspicuousness.
The trauma emerges through the frightening grin, as he sings the song he sang with his mother. It transforms, just as Joe transforms, in front of the mirror. He discards the song along with his dutiful son persona. He dons the assassin’s psyche, even though the screaming, the gunshots, and the traumatic noise are still echoing in his ears. He swaps one trauma for the next. The mirror shows him to himself, as he exists. The scars are visible, both physical and emotional. Joe smiles them off, yet the pain of the song fortifies him into violence. It’s the potion that transforms Jekyll into Hyde. Yet in Joe, both entities can exist. The mirror reveals both at the same time, for the scars are evidence of the many back and forths between the two. Joe lingers at the border between salvation and damnation, for they are tightly interlinked. The song is both a nod to the peaceful world represented by mother and the go-ahead towards the world of violence. The mirror is both the reckoner of Joe’s trauma and the bestower of power. It is a bartering spot in which Joe trades a part of his untainted soul for the strength and violence he would need to face the evil paedophiles.
The entire rescue operation scene is stripped of any glamourous violence but remains utterly unsettling in its noirish poetry. Grainy CCTV footage from the cameras positioned at various corners in the building, where the underage girls are kept (the playground), presents to the audience what Joe is doing. The static cameras add a new level of realism to the entire operation. The audience can see Joe and the bodies he has left behind, but not hear him. All we can hear is the retro diegetic music playing in the house. It adds another layer of jarring impropriety to the scene in which Joe is killing his way up to the playground. The surveillance cameras show Joe from various angles. He is almost ubiquitous. Agile and precise, he no longer appears bulky and out of shape. He blends in with the walls like before, but he’s a ninja now. The lovey dovey lyrics of “Angel Baby” by Rose Hamlin talk of innocent love. Yet, as the underage girls emerge dazed from their rooms after Joe has killed their abusers, a sense of loss of innocence gives double meaning to the song. Any future romantic feeling these girls might have has now become tainted by this trauma, which they will have to learn to live or die with. This is a wrong that Joe aims to rectify, one traumatized girl at a time, in a bid to find his own stolen innocence or perhaps some imaginings of untainted childhoods.
The visual imagery of Joe carrying the disoriented and possibly drugged Nina through the darkened house of horror has a gentle symbiotic poetry to it. He’s all in black with his trademark hoodie, while she’s in a virginal white nightgown. He’s both the boogie man and the blessed saviour, an out-of-shape Jesus lookalike wanting to save the innocents. Nina is a picture of innocence, but her almost inert countenance suggests an early onset of trauma, made certain by the sound of her voice performing a countdown, just like Joe. Nina’s blond locks contrast with Joe’s dark grey beard, her lily-white arms around his wide black-clad shoulders seem almost too delicate against his bulky frame. For all their apparent contrast, Joe and Nina found each other in the same place of darkness, in the waiting room of a new and beautiful day that may or may not dawn. For all the burdens he’s had on those scarred shoulders, this is what Joe finds the lightest. There will be hope as long as there is youth and Nina embodies it perfectly. Against his dark and hulky frame, she hangs, almost floating. They are both each other’s guardian angel.
Ramsay’s tender cinematic poetry reaches new heights with the aquatic burial of Joe’s mother. In a nod to Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, the visuals of mother’s white locks of hair emerging from the body bag he’s lowering gently into a watery grave are both stunning and mournful. The death of the innocent is a solemn act made beautiful by their return to peace. Yet peace is not something Joe is accustomed to. Even in death, or in near-death, he cannot find peace. His mother’s white locks of hair floating in the dark water are his goodbyes to the world. The goodbye lingers in the water, waiting for the blond locks to turn into a ray of hope. Yet it is a light unknown to him, for it dwells on the other side of his torment. Joe needs to go through the routine of suicide once again before he can understand new life and hope.
Now that he’s been released from his duty of caring after his mother, the perfect time for Joe’s final attempt at his life might be on hand. Yet, just as all the times before, Joe’s need for someone he can save and protect prevails. It is deeply ingrained in him, as a consequence of all the trauma he’s suffered. Nina’s imagined effigy reaches him in the depths of the trauma and pulls him back out into the light, as he sinks under the weights of the rocks he’s placed in his pockets. This brings him towards a fresh awakening. He can’t die, for his job is not over. He has a new purpose in life, or the old one under a new face. Out come the rocks from his pockets. He swims to the surface. Back to light, back to life, back to saving Nina. The scene is accompanied by Jonny Greenwood’s now delicate composition, a mixture of sounds from nature, synthesisers, and superb violins. Greenwood’s haunting music has been with us from the beginning, yet it is in this scene the sadness reaches its apex in both the sound and imagery.
After such a rollercoaster of violence, unuttered cries, and lonely stumblings in the dark for both Joe and Nina, they’ve found each other. It remains to be seen if being equally damaged will help them in the path towards healing. With a last dramatic hallucination of shooting himself in the head, Joe puts his suicidal demons to rest. He is awakened from his bloody imaginings by a cheerful sounding Nina, who announces that it’s a beautiful day. Not taking his eyes off her, he agrees: “It’s a beautiful day.” Joe’s becoming human is tightly interlinked with Nina’s own fate. Joe’s belief that there is life on the other side of trauma lives and breathes alongside Nina’s angelic smile. In time, redemption might be possible for both these distorted souls.
