“Some filmmakers rust during periods of inactivity,” begins Guy Lodge in Variety. “Lynne Ramsay arches and tenses, lying in wait like an attack dog. And attack she does, though not in all the expected ways, in her astonishing fourth feature You Were Never Really Here, a stark, sinewy, slashed-to-the-bone hitman thriller far more concerned with the man than the hit. Working from a pulp-fiction source”—Jonathan Ames’s novella—“that another director might have fashioned into a Taken knockoff, Ramsay instead strips the classically botched job at the story’s core down to its barest, bloodiest necessities, lingering far more lavishly on the unspoken emotions rippling across leading man Joaquin Phoenix’s face, and the internal lacerations of trauma and abuse they cumulatively reveal.”
“A film of prismatic brilliance, in which single images convey the information of entire scenes, scenes play like short films, and quasi-subliminal edits create psychology as raw as an open wound (and there are plenty of those too), this 85-minute-long movie is the cinematic equivalent of finding the ocean in a drop of water,” writes Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “You Were Never Really Here cannot be described as ‘arthouse goes genre’ because from Ramsay’s vantage point, so stratospherically far above the majority of mere mortal filmmakers, those distinctions don’t exist. There is just filmmaking of the purest, most inventive and energizing kind.”
“It's a character study conducted primarily through an aesthetic vision,” writes Sam C. Mac at the House Next Door. “Heavy-for-hire Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) stumbles through his daily existence in an expressionistic haze of prescription drugs and disturbed memories, his mind flashing on images of childhood abuse and former lives as a military soldier and an F.B.I. agent. The only people Joe interacts with are his elderly, doddering mother (Judith Roberts) and an occupational middle-man, John McCleary (John Doman), who gets him his assignments from wealthy clients. Joe's latest job is to rescue Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), the abducted daughter of New York Senator Votto (Alex Manette).”
“Cinematic relatives include Dirty Harry and Travis Bickle,” suggests Sophie Monks Kaufman at Little White Lies. This is “a noir thriller with few thrills, and a character study with limited character. Jonny Greenwood’s darkly devastating score accompanies Joe as he does the rounds of his world.”
“Another type of film might have attempted to widen and straighten the material into a conventional political conspiracy thriller about a low-level tough guy out of his depth, almost like something by John Grisham,” writes the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “This is very much not what Ramsay is doing with this film, which gives us only an iceberg-tip of the dirty dealings which compose its outer plot structure and is more interested in the abused and damaged state of a guy whose life and mind have been strip-mined by the violence he has seen and perpetrated, and by his muddled, Travis-like conviction that some kind of rescue for himself and other people could be possible.”
“Ramsay streamlines B-genre narrative tropes into an efficient and emotionally potent psychological portrait which recalls the woozy style of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011) remixed with Paul Schrader’s 1979 Hardcore,” writes Nicholas Bell at Ioncinema. “Building on the nostalgic essence of the oft mimicked era of New American Cinema, this mostly dialogue free exercise is laced with themes of awakening and atonement in a fretful world filled with pain, heartache, and the ultimate reality of our expendability.”
“But then there will be visual tricks, like a shocker in the last five minutes, which just feel like a gimmick or, even worse, a misfiring joke,” finds Leslie Felperin in the Hollywood Reporter. “Indeed, the tone isn’t always easy to gauge throughout . . . Originally a still photographer, Ramsay has an eye for composition and near-abstraction that connects her more with art world figures like Bill Viola and Gerhard Richter than her British film contemporaries. Let’s hope the next film is worthy of that gift, and that we don’t have to wait too many years to see it.”
“Male directors are often criticized for having a taste for gratuitous violence, but Ramsay gets down with the big boys in proving that blowing heads off can be a genderless pursuit,” writes Barbara Scharres at RogerEbert.com. “At one point, Joe is asked, ‘Where do you want to go,’ and he replies with a blank look, ‘I don’t know.’ Someone needs to ask Ramsey the same question.”
For IndieWire’s Eric Kohn, “the movie is a compelling hodgepodge in search of an elusive bigger picture.”
“You Were Never Really Here looks beautiful and beguiling thanks to the cinematography of Thomas Townend, which seems perfectly attuned to the moods and range of the film,” writes Screen’s Allan Hunter.
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