In the Flesh: You Were Never Really Here

Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) dreams of killing himself. He fantasizes idly about it, miming the act of stabbing himself through the palate and into the brain as he lies on his back in bed. He imagines blowing his brains out with his .38 snub-nose revolver in the middle of a diner, the world going about its business around his leaking corpse. At the film’s midpoint he walks into a lake, his pockets filled with stones, and sinks slowly down into the rippling dark. He’s a man who’s spent his entire life trying to refashion the story of his childhood, glimpsed throughout the film in fragmented and horror movie-coded flashbacks, first as a child trapped by an abusive father, then as a soldier and an FBI field agent, and finally as a freelance hitman specializing in recovering trafficked minors. He’s trying, without fully understanding why in a moment-to-moment analytical way, to unbreak things that are now fundamentally broken. It’s enough to make anyone dream of death.

“Jaded hitman finds his soul while rescuing young girl” was a shopworn plot forty years ago, but writer/director Lynne Ramsay pivots neatly around its most tedious beats to make it feel not just fresh but genuinely surprising. There is no triumphant moment of bonding. There is no redemption through some final act of violence. Joe isn’t saved from his past by Nina’s (Ekaterina Samsonov) innocence. Nor does he rescue her from the same fate. By the time he finds her at the film’s climax she’s already been raped who knows how many times and taken matters into her own hands, cutting her molestor’s throat with a straight razor before sitting down to dinner. She’s perhaps thirteen at the oldest, but life moves inexorably onward no matter how much misery you heap on any given human being. Joe reaches her in time to realize only that his past is written in stone.

Perhaps the film’s most arresting moment comes after Joe mortally wounds one of two hitmen sent to kill himself and his mother in their home. After he interrogates the nameless agent (Scott Price), Joe lies down next to him on the kitchen floor and lets him take his hand. The man who longs for death and the man made to confront it all at once lie there together until one of them ceases to be. It’s such a deep, specific sort of intimacy, the same kind engendered by Ramsay’s focus on Joe’s chronic pain and extensive scarring. We see him work and ice his shoulder, extract a broken tooth himself, recall with haunting specificity the twitching of a dying child's foot against loose earth. Of course he stays beside his would-be killer. That man is scar tissue, too, another memory to haunt him, another body to ache and twitch in sympathy with his own. Another wound on a body made of them.