When Your Savior Complex Isn't, Particularly: The Brutal 'You Were Never Really Here'
Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin) directs Joaquin Phoenix in this violent, strident and repetitive tale about a man who sets out to rescue a kidnapped girl.
The Scottish director Lynne Ramsay has a rapturous way with a camera that has served her beautifully in a small but impressive resume of intense films that skew to the dark side of blighted psyches. In works like , her moody 1998 short about a little girl who discovers by chance that she has a sister, and (also 1998), about life on Glasgow's grimy underside, Ramsay terrain. Her affinity for bleak British lives in free fall has often gotten her lumped in with British miserabilists like Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. In fact, Ramsay is an ardent stylist for whom beauty, grime, and terror go hand in hand with generous helpings of black comedy.
