I was seeing this title thrown around with pictures of Joaquin Phoenix, but didn’t pay any attention. That is, until the name of writer/director Lynne Ramsay was thrown into the mix. She’s also the writer/director of We Need to Talk About Kevin, a movie which I’ve absolutely adored. I’d only recently realized that Ramsay hasn’t released a feature film in between the two. I saw Ezra Miller comment on that, and he said that she was a director of such vision and integrity, that she had to walk away from many projects along the way in order to keep said vision in tact. Now you’ve got me really intrigued about this movie.
So Phoenix is a man (with some form of PTSD) who makes a living shaking down shady characters in order to rescue young girls and bring them home. But of course, he ends up taking a job that goes south quick.
This film has been getting raves (mostly) across the board. I didn’t get it. For me, it felt very incoherent. I went into this pretty cold, so I didn’t know where the story was trying to go. I also didn’t know what it was trying to say.
What I did like, was that there were these flashes of (often) violent imagery that seemed to act as flashbacks that were affecting Phoenix. I didn’t entirely know what they meant, but I liked their effect. I just wish I could grasp the bigger picture better so that I could appreciate the smaller picture of those images.
You Were Never Really Here – \m/ \m/