You Were Never Really Here

You Were Never Really Here (2017) is about a man who finds and returns abducted girls, and it barely shows the violence. Joe is a former soldier and former federal agent. He works off the books now: a family pays him to find their daughter and he goes with a hammer. He lives with his mother, speaks to nobody, and thinks constantly about killing himself. He is hired for a senator's daughter. The job goes well and what follows turns into a trap. The method is keeping the violence outside the frame. One raid is watched entirely on security camera footage. After a fight only the aftermath is shown. In one death scene the camera looks at two men lying on the floor humming a song together. Joe's past is never told. Only fragments of a second enter: a childhood memory, a shipping container, a child in a desert. The audience has to assemble it. Lynne Ramsay wrote and directed, from Jonathan Ames's short novel. Joaquin Phoenix won best actor at Cannes; Ramsay won the screenplay prize. Jonny Greenwood wrote the score and the sound design carries half the film. It is very short and explains nothing. It runs 89 minutes. Good for: art cinema, character portraits, and sound design. Less good for: the subjects are child abuse and suicide, and the narrative is deliberately fragmentary.