You Were Never Really Here (2017)

“[To the father of a missing girl, referring to a lead as to where she might be ] If she’s there, I’ll get her back. ” – Joe

Number of Times Seen – 1 (15 Jun 2018)

Brief Synopsis – A man who specializes in recovering kidnapped kids gets in over his head when he must save the daughter of a Senator.

My Take on it – I have been a fan of Joaquin Phoenix (Leif) ever since he starred in Russkies (1987) and Parenthood (1990), but he recently has chosen some really abstract kind of roles that completely take away from watching an enjoyable story.

This film attempts to show us what goes through the mind of a traumatized character who wishes to do good, but is haunted by things that happened to him in the past and unfortunately this leads to a very incoherent film.

The fact that this is all very abstract takes away from the experience of watching the film and it loses any impact it would normally have with such a subject matter.

This film is actually quite stunning on a purely visual level, but the fact that the story is a complete mess makes it a real disaster trying to make heads or tails out of it all.

Bottom Line – Crazy film that tries to show us what is going on in the mind of a character yet finds itself quite incoherent. Phoenix once again chooses a storyline that is too abstract and that takes away from the impact of such an idea. Visually, this film is stunning, but story-wise, it’s a complete mess.

MovieRob’s Favorite Trivia – Very little actual violence is shown in the movie, but more often the aftermath of violent scenes. Lynne Ramsay stated that before this movie she had never done anything with a gun, so she had to figure out how to approach violence. Budget constraints didn’t allow her to shoot complex action scenes, so this gave birth to the idea to show “post rage aftermath scenes” instead of the violence itself. Lynne Ramsay confessed she thought it was very risky to use this approach, because if it didn’t work she wasn’t able to go back and reshoot the scenes. (From IMDB)

Rating – Razzie Worthy (2/10)

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