A ghost is born

‘You Were Never Really Here’ portrays a damaged veteran

Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay makes horror films—ones that leave you with a sense of unease and crippling dread. She does this not by deploying jump-scares or frightening monsters but by displaying the horrors of a mundane life turned upside-down, via tragedy, poverty, or the ringing hum of PTSD. With her latest, “You Were Never Really Here,” Ramsay focuses her fractured, staccato lens on a wounded man.

Joaquin Phoenix portrays Joe, a traumatized veteran with a desensitized penchant for violence who makes a living tracking down missing girls. His profession is revealed in fragments at the beginning: a burning photo of a young girl, a bloody hammer stuffed in a bag then tossed in the trash. We don’t get a clear glimpse of Joe until 15 minutes in, when we see his solitary—save for an ailing mother—home life. He doesn’t really do much.

Until he gets the next call. When one job goes terribly wrong, Joe’s tenuous grasp on reality begins to fray as a conspiracy unravels, leading to what may be his own demise—or his awakening. This time he’s hired to retrieve the troubled daughter of a high-profile politician. The job sucks from the get-go—the “retirement job” is always the one that goes wrong—and leads Joe down a bloody trail of vengeance and retribution.

Ramsay’s films are often unsentimental, meditative examinations of wounded figures on the fringes of society.  She’s less concerned with the plot of the story than she is with the wounded, damaged characters within.  The young boy in “Ratcatcher” (1999), on the verge of maturity, grapples with the drowning death of a classmate in 1973 Glasgow. Then there’s the mental and emotional breakdown of Tilda Swinton’s Eva, unmoored by her son Kevin, who perpetrates a Columbine-esque attack at school in “We Need To Talk About Kevin” (2011). Eva bears the cross of his horrific act while also coming to terms with her own responsibility for his behavior.

“You Were Never Really Here,” Ramsay’s most assured film, bears all the hallmarks of her singular voice—the fractured narrative, the measured and lyrical cinematography, the jagged and raw sound design. Ramsay provides Phoenix a standout role, unrivaled since his portrayal in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master.” Phoenix manifests the wounded Joe as a brooding man who skulks about like a feral, caged gorilla. Jonny Greenwood’s score is hypnotic and dissonant, an excellent reflection of Joe’s interior headspace.

Sharing spiritual DNA with Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” Phoenix’s Joe could be a direct descendant of the disillusioned and angry Travis Bickle, another veteran who returns home disoriented and riding the razor’s edge of sanity. And much like that 1970s classic, “YWNRH” is a film about how abuse and conflict can damage those who serve, those who are dumped back home wounded and shell-shocked. Ramsay weaves a hypnotic film with the numbing effects of trauma and the carnage of battlefield, depicting how war creates waking ghosts upon soldiers’ return. We train these men so that often violence is all that makes them feel human.