Avis des critiques

Through an accretion of extreme close-ups, masterfully disjointed editing, and impressionistic sound design, Lynne Ramsay’s master class in style as structure swallows up its protagonist in a world thrumming with the repercussions of his trauma.

Ramsay’s filmmaking is, as always, fluid and impressionistic. What’s new here is the steep sense of genre awareness. Everybody knows this is a film about a man with a hero complex, trying to survive a world that hates women. Ramsay, a director of immense imagination and offbeat taste, forces you to wonder whether that complex is worth it.

From this character description, it seems like an unusually cliched choice for Ramsay. However, while Ramsay’s subject choice may seem conventional, You Were Never Really Here is anything but, and the film is definitively hers – another installment in a filmic career concerned with representing the repercussions of violence.

The violence in You Were Never Really Here is abstracted from ’90s indie films so that it is the aftereffects of sudden bursts of mayhem that concern her, along with PTSD and loss, the other great Gen X themes. Judith Roberts, the sexy neighbor from Eraserhead, plays Joe’s dying mother in an inspired ’90s-style casting move, and such moves extend to Ramsay’s use of music.

While on the face of it this is a movie about a man using a ball-peen hammer to exact retribution on abusers of little girls, what Ramsay does brilliantly is put the viewer inside a fractured mind. He is a broken man bent on dispensing Old Testament justice in a fallen world. By showing us what he sees Ramsay makes us feel his pain.

This is not a date night movie. In fact, it’s quite a bummer. But if a movie is great art, it surpasses and triumphs over the downer elements of it. Like all good art, it lifts you up even if it’s dragging you down. If art is supposed to tingle your nerve endings (as well as make you want to throw up a little), then this is it.

A demanding film, but it’s not a reckless one. To watch it is to see a rigorous and intensely creative filmmaker at work. No wonder Ramsay’s name doesn’t make it onto a lot of female-director lists. Her work defies the concept of cheerleading, or of special pleading. She’s a list unto herself.

What interests me is the violence, which is both sadistic and oblique. Ramsay always depicts it in a desensitized way that sidesteps visceral impact (a lot of it happens off-screen), but is still disturbing, sometimes darkly comic. . . . Ramsay’s direction is intentionally cracked, scenes put together from jagged pieces or in come cases just one long close-up.

There isn’t a boringly composed frame in this movie. . . . Phoenix may be the film’s star, but it’s his director who’s giving a truly virtuoso performance. Ramsay’s much anticipated comeback feature—her third since 1999’s remarkable Ratcatcher and first since 2011’s divisive best-seller adaptation We Need to Talk About Kevin—is an extended lesson in formal control.

It has a jittery caffeinated energy reminiscent of the great sleazeball thrillers of the 1970s and '80s, gritty New York movies, corrupt cop movies. Ramsay's gift of invention is in overdrive (the title credit screen is practically worth the price of admission), and her approach is audacious.

Phoenix is impressively huge as Joe, which gives Ramsay the added gift of being able to segment him with her camera, to carve him up like a Christmas ham. His unruly beard, his oddly shaped torso, his heavily falling feet, everything becomes the subject of a shot at some point.

By way of plot, poor Joe's so bent out of mental shape that he fails to see that he's slaughtered his way into a trap. At least I think it's a trap; it's hard to be sure, so mired is the action in toxic-avenger brutality set to stolid repeat. Style overwhelms substance; characters recede into a fog of endless setup accentuated with Johnny Greenwood's meaningfully strident score.