'You Were Never Really Here' review: Joaquin Phoenix has never looked so sad

It's about time that Taxi Driver got a remake.

Summer is usually thought of as the time when big, fun blockbusters hit the screen. That might have been the case last week with Avengers: Infinity War, but it couldn’t be any less true for You Were Never Really Here. Get ready to leave the theater sad and upset with this one.

You Were Never Really Here is directed by Lynne Ramsay, who is best known for 2011’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. Given that film’s dark subject matter, it shouldn’t really come as that much of a surprise that You Were Never Really Here takes the tone that it does, but it’s still pretty unsettling nonetheless.

Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is suicidal. That’s established from the very opening scene, and then several other troubling scenes afterward.

The exact reasoning as to why is never fully established, although we are given glimpses into Joe’s tragic past that offer some suggestions as to why. Seemingly, he was in the military for awhile and has seen some things that no person should ever have to witness, giving him serious PTSD and depression.

The military is also — I’m assuming — where Joe gained skills in hand-to-hand combat. After coming home to his mother (he has no one else to come home to), played by the always great Judith Roberts, he figures he might as well try and put those skills to good use.

That’s why Joe takes an off-the-books job as a gun for hire of sorts. He’s not a traditional hitman or assassin, but rather a hired enforcer who rescues trafficked girls.

His latest case is an especially troubling one. New York State Senator Albert Votto (Alex Manette) called Joe after her daughter, Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), was abducted and sold to a brothel. Votto wants everyone involved dead, which Joe is happy to oblige to.

However, after arriving at the brothel one night, Joe finds out that the case runs much deeper than he thought. Given that he’s incredibly unstable and has a hard enough time taking care of himself, he’s really way over his head when he suddenly has to take care of Nina.

I told you this was Taxi Driver. Guys, it’s so Taxi Driver, you don’t even know.

Except unlike Taxi Driver, which I find to have several long and drawn out conversations that never really go anywhere, You Were Never Really Here comes in at just a quick 89 minutes and is still able to pack a series of emotional gut-punches. That’s talented filmmaking right there.

Ramsay holds nothing back in You Were Never Really Here. Right from the opening, we know that Joe is a troubled man who’s in a world of hurt. The further the film goes along, the more we explore this damaged psychosis and how damning someone’s past can really be.

What’s great about You Were Never Really Here is how laser-focused on this idea the film is. There are moments in the movie that calls for some extreme, bloody violence. There’s a great scene where Joe goes into a hardware store and picks out the right hammer for the work he’s about to accomplish (aka bashing people’s heads in), which makes the audience think what we’re about to see is going to be something out of Tarantino’s Grindhouse.

You Were Never Really Here stays away from all of this though. In fact, the camera often cuts away during these ultra-violent scenes, or it’ll play around with some different filmmaking techniques like showing it all from security camera footage. The point of the movie isn’t to make a Death Wish-style revenge film — it’s to depict a man who’s in true grief and has nowhere left to go.

Joaquin Phoenix gets all the credit in the world for this role. Part of me wishes that this movie came out sometime in last November or December so that he could get award talk, because everyone is going to forget about You Were Never Really Here come next Oscar season, I’m calling it now. Nonetheless, Phoenix is raw and vulnerable in here — putting himself out on a ledge as he risks everything on the character.

Because Joe is so well drawn out, it then makes perfect sense why he would bind with someone like Nina. Ekaterina Samsonov doesn’t have a lot of lines in the movie, but she’s able to do a lot with what she’s given. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that she might have a career in front of her after this role — the subtle facial expressions and nuances she gives during some of the film’s more heavy scenes are nothing short of an incredible.

There are times when You Were Never Really Here gets a bit too lost in the metaphysical or ambiguous abstract world in which you don’t really understand what’s happening, as you might expect from the name of the film. I get that this movie is obviously catered to an audience who might be looking for that kind of film, but it’s somewhat jarring when it comes out of left-field like it does here — even if it does provide some incredible imagery (the image of characters floating in a lake is beautifully imagined).

Luckily, it never lasts too long and the actual story is able to get back on track rather quickly. You Were Never Really Here isn’t going to attract as wide of an audience as something like Deadpool 2 is going to in a couple of weeks, but there’s still some brilliant talent involved both behind and in front of the camera here.

Watch the trailer for You Were Never Really Here below and then let us know in the comments what you thought of the movie!