You Were Never Really Here: When Joe Comes Back, Joe’s Head Will Crack

The Joe man is back
When Joe comes back, Joe's head will crack
When Joe's head cracks
When that big head cracks
It's "Welcome back, Joe
Welcome back, Joe."
You don't have to be alone Joe
You don't have to be alone Joe

- Big Black, “Bazooka Joe”

So I guess right now I’m thinking a lot about films in conversation with each other - remakes, like last week’s Suspiria, are one example. Another example would be a film that isn’t an explicit remake, but owes narrative or stylistic debts to other specific films, and in their unique combination, end up commenting on those films. I kind of like thinking about this, and truth be told, this week’s film is probably the furthest thing I’ve done from horror in a while, so I’m coming at it from a somewhat different angle anyway.

So, as glib as this sounds, I think You Were Never Really Here is really interesting in that it ends up taking the basic narrative thrust of action potboiler Taken and filtering it through Taxi Driver, and the results are pretty good. It’s a somber, impressionistic take on the idea of a damaged hero going to great lengths against powerful people to bring one person home safely.

The opening is cryptic, a sequence of brief actions, an unseen figure cleaning out a hotel room - burning a photo of a young girl in the room’s trash can, disposing of some jewelry, smoothing out the covers on the bed…

…wiping the head of a ball-peen hammer clean and flushing bloody rags down the toilet.

The man is Joe. Joe is ex-military, ex-FBI, and as we get to know him, the scars (both physical and psychic) left by his time in both make themselves evident in startling, intrusive flashbacks. In the here and now, Joe lives with his ailing mother (whose own history of abuse and Joe’s childhood witnessing it also intrude in flashback) and earns a living tracking down young girls who have gone missing - often runaways who have been trafficked into sex slavery. He tends to hurt the people responsible. Joe, then, has seen some shit, and the toll it’s taken on him is stark. He’s a deeply damaged hulk of a man who moves through his world as circumspectly as possible, carrying around a death wish that nestles right up against his very particular set of skills.

When the film begins, he’s just successfully finished one job and has had to break off ties with a particular middleman because that middleman’s son has a friend who recognized Joe as he was leaving a meetup. For reasons that aren’t quite clear (at this point, it becomes all too clear further in), this is unacceptable, and Joe walks away from his business relationship with this man in the blink of an eye. This is Joe’s biggest priority - that he move through the world as invisibly as possible, avoiding recognition or detection. He is never really there. He picks up a new job - the runaway daughter of a politician who is working on a high-profile gubernatorial campaign. As it must in films like this, things spiral out of control as it becomes apparent that there’s much more at stake than in your typical rescue job, and the film details this economically but powerfully. Once the other shoe drops, everything moves very fast, as Joe attempts to outrun both the people trying to kill him and his own suicidal urges in an effort to set things right and figure out what the hell is going on.

So, thinking about the idea of films in conversation with each other, this really can be though of as the anti-Taken in a lot of ways. Both feature men trying to track down young women who’ve been taken by human traffickers, but Taken features a lot of monologues, a lot of posturing and extended action scenes - massive shootouts and brawls that linger over glibly expressed violence. You Were Never Really Here keeps the talk to a minimum. Joe is a man of few words, and it’s a film of little dialogue - much of it mumbled or muttered. Likewise, very little violence is directly observed - it’s almost always just off-camera, or has already happened and we are witness to the aftermath instead. What glimpses we do get are absolutely brutal, but the camera doesn’t linger, and will just as often show it in a mirror or at some other remove instead. As a result, it isn’t trivialized - the suddenness of the aftermath is as shocking as any fight scene, if not moreso.

What we get is almost a haiku of a film, the story and the protagonist’s internal state all put up on the screen for us, communicated through images, rather than exposition. The New York in which the film is set is very much in the mode of Taxi Driver, as it takes place mostly at night, in places the tourists don’t go, light spilling over luxury and menace all alike. Like that film’s Travis Bickle, Joe is obviously damaged and has trouble with most human connection, but his violence is controlled, channeled into more morally acceptable outlets, and where Bickle ultimately exploded, you get the sense that Joe would implode instead - if he didn’t have sex traffickers on which to focus his violence, he’d direct it at himself instead. The girls he rescues aren’t an obsession or pretext for violence like Bickle’s underage sex worker, they seem to genuinely be his way of trying to do good in the world. Where our only real insight into Bickle’s mindset are his monologues and fumbling attempts at relationships, Joe’s is all up on the screen for us to see. The line between actual events and what Joe is imagining is often thin and both are depicted alongside each other to sometimes startling effect. The result is a film that eschews a lot of the melodrama of Taken and ultimately much of the nihilism of Taxi Driver, talking to both, but very much its own thing

And as its own thing, it’s so well realized. It’s beautifully shot - very composed, with lots of dynamism in light, color, tone, and perspective, which you kind of need when the dialogue is so sparse. Longer, slower takes are interrupted by sudden, intrusive shorter cuts, so much like Joe can never really relax, we can’t either. Likewise, the soundtrack relies on a mixture of electronics, discordant strings, thumps and rattles to convey deep unease. It isn’t until an end bathed in light and silence that Joe can finally rest, and let go of so much that haunts him. It’s a film that moves quickly, but never feels rushed - instead, it feels, elegant and economical in conveying the costs this life has exerted and what it might feel like to finally be free.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon