You can watch You Were Never Really Here at these online streaming locations:
Woooaaaahhhh. I literally just finished watching the movie You Were Never Really Here and I have to say, this movie jack-knifed my truck. Just utterly and completely ruined me. In an amazing way. Like über fantastic sort of a way. But WOW. The quiet reverie of its intense violence and the justification of said violence? Just perfection from beginning to end. And it’s fairly funny, because I just eviscerated Joaquin Phoenix for his quiet emasculation of Jesus in the movie Mary Magdalene. But that same quiet method is utterly mind blowing when associated with a psychopath hitman. So why don’t we away on a deconstructive explanation of the movie You Were Never Really Here, shall we?
Obviously this movie isn’t going to be for everyone. And as a trigger warning, it mainly deals with underage sex trafficking. So, it’s a fairly unpleasant topic from beginning to end. But I’ve never seen a better moral justification for the violence contained within. So there’s that. Hahahah. Here, if you haven’t seen the movie yet, maybe you should watch it first – and I’ve even conveniently provided you with every location you can watch it online right now:
Please though, don’t watch this trailer and think… “Ah, a standard dad revenge flick,” or something. That is not what we have here. This is a deep deep dive into the psychosis of a hitman hell-bent on punishing sex traffickers. But it is also a painful look into his own neuroses as well. And Holy Moses on a Segway is this movie dark. I mean, Joe’s favorite weapon for going after horrible people? A ball-peen hammer for the love of all that’s good and holy. If I were to compare the feel of this movie with another, I would probably say that it’s got more in common with Se7en than not. So, that should tell you what we are dealing with here. So with that said, if you have not seen the movie yet, you really need to leave now. Ok? Because from here on out be all kinds of movie spoilers. Need a way to watch it? I got you covered: Netflix, Amazon, Google. I just wish I had seen it in the theater. But alas, it didn’t hit my radar until Shelby mentioned it the other day. (THANKS SHELBY! I should give out THiNC. Coins or something. Points or something. The other day, I seriously considered buying a stack of THiNC. shirts to hand out, but are you kidding me?!? I can’t afford that. Do you think I actually make money on this site!?? And have I mentioned lately I work at an NGO during my real day job? hahah. Just the weekly email newsletter costs me a fortune! You guys are about as high maintenance as they come!)
From Here On Out Be Spoiler Dragons
The movies cinematography could best be described as sedative-bokeh. Not exactly sure what that means myself. But feels like the perfect description. But I think the look of the film is intentional – we are seeing the world through Joe’s eyes. And he is in perpetuative downer drug fugue, and mainly to cover a PTSD past of some sort. We never really see what his past really was, but we know that he suffers from it. Not just his previous career, but also his family life as a boy. All of it culminated in a highly tuned marination of awfulness in order to craft his psychopathic tendencies. The only thing I can say? Thank God he willingly points himself at the bad guys.
I think I’ve leapt ahead again, haven’t I? Sorry about that.
Quick You Were Never Really Here Movie Walkthrough
As the movie opens, we see the last few details of his previous job. We see his soon to be familiar hammer. We see blood. A necklace with the monogram of Sandy. And we hear him tell someone on a payphone (really, could you find a payphone if you wanted to these days?) that it’s done. So, we’ve just missed his last job. Is he a good guy? A bad guy? Coming in cold, it looks like he’s all bad, what with the necklace. But then we see him with his mother, and the care with which he delouses her refrigerator of spoiled food, and we start to get a different picture of what is going on.
We learn that Joe is careful. He is methodical. And he is all manner of tormented. He fixates on dying. Suffocating. Stabbing himself. Have I yet mentioned that our man is tormented? Oh, yes, I have. Well, he’s tormented. And even before we witness his first full job, we learn that he worked with ICE, or some border patrol unit, that was responsible for handling smuggling, and maybe human trafficking? And we see him opening a storage unit filled with dozens of dead children. So yeah, his memories are chock full of insanity no mere mortal should be forced to witness.
His handler says that the next job will be a big one for them. $50,000. It’s the missing daughter of Senator John McCleary. McCleary’s wife had committed suicide in the last few years, and Nina had taken to running away regularly. But this time, she hadn’t come back. And through an anonymous tip, they were aware of a place where she might be being pimped out. So Joe goes and gets her back. Doing so by casing the house and getting a runner to let him in. And he violently kills everyone in the house. Have I yet mentioned that his favorite weapon is a ball-peen hammer? I have? Oh, well, it bears repeating. Trust me.
But when Joe goes to the meet location to give Nina back to her father, he doesn’t show up. But then Nina sees on the news that her father has committed suicide by jumping off of a hotel. Moments later, the head of the hotel is there at the door, of which, Joe manages to catch most of his brains on his face when the person behind him shoots him. And with that, two security personnel come in. One takes Nina, and the other, who was about to kill Joe, ends up dying by letting his guard down even momentarily.
Hurt, Joe wonders how he was found. And eventually figures out that they had been tracked from a tracking beacon in his tooth. So, from that we know that, holy cow, Joe must have been deep in the world of espionage or secret services? Is that a standard operating procedure for any of our armed forces? Or CIA? No idea. Some clandestine something or other. Or, could it be Joe hallucinating? Maybe. We can talk about that in a bit.
So, Joe starts walking the cat back, trying to find out what is going on. He heads back to his handler. Dead. His previous cut out that he used for communicating. Dead. McCleary dead. Mother dead. And when he learned that his mother was dead, he snuck in through an upstairs window, and ends up getting the jump on two men in his kitchen. He kills one immediately, and the second one he shoots in the gut.
The man crawling on the floor says, “I don’t want it out.” And then, “There is always crying.” When Joe begins to question him, he learns from the injured man that Governor Williams liked Nina, she was his favorite. That Williams trades them. And in a wild moment, Joe lays on the ground next to him as they sing the song on the radio. And then they hold hands as the man dies. For such a violent movie, it was an oddly (disturbingly) touching moment. (The song they sang? Was “I’ve Never Been To Me”, by Charlene? Which, I’ve never heard of before. But I dig the lyrics, that is for sure.)
Right, well, we have two dead guys in Joe’s house, along with a dead mother. And the visions and flashbacks are lighting up Joe’s cerebral cortex like a forth of July pyrotechnic display. Not really knowing where this downward spiral will end, and with his mother dead, he puts on his best suit and heads out into the forest to a lake. In a flashback eerily similar to the Mary Magdelene movie baptismal scenes, Joe adds rocks to his mother’s body and lowers her to the bottom of the lake. And as he heads down with her, we realize that Joe is committing suicide. He has to be. It’s this fixation with death that has chased him this entire movie that has now finally caught him.
But then he hears Nina counting. When he first saved her, she was counting slowly backwards from 40 to make reality go away. A coping technique. A survivor’s technique to push back the madness that was so close to her. And there, at the bottom of the lake, Joe changes his mind. He pulls the rocks out of his pockets, and he swims towards the surface. And I remember thinking… oh, I would hate to be Governor Williams at this point. Because we know that Joe is going to kill Williams in the worst, most violent way imaginable. Probably in a way that includes a number of well placed ball-peen hammer strikes.
The Ending of the Movie You Were Never Really Here Explained
This movie isn’t really too confusing overall, for those of you who actually paid attention, and were patient. The movie revealed its secrets in due time… generally well enough. But the ending? That got dicey. I literally had to avoid yelling at the screen, WAIT WHAT, as it unraveled. Actually, there were two different times I literally stopped the movie, rewound, tried to figure out what I had missed, stopped it again, and just stared at the ceiling. But let’s walk through the ending together, and see if we can figure it out together.
Sopping wet from his baptism, and resurrection, Joe trudged his way back to his car… and onward towards the Governor’s mansion. But as he maneuvered into the estate, and onward, and into the first building, he started finding security members dead and splayed across the floor like spent wrappers. He was very confused. The further in he went, the more dead people he would find.
Until ultimately? There was the governor, throat slit, bled out across the house floor.
Worse? There was no Nina to be found. This is what Joe had Lazarus’d for? He had had a destiny with death, but now someone was toying with him and taunting him. And for what? But then he found Nina, at the dining room table, calmly eating dinner. And there, on the table? A wickedly scary looking straight razor that was covered in blood. So there was answer number one to the biggest question of the ending… which was, who killed the governor and his security detail. It was Nina. She had gotten her own revenge. Revenge for the sins propagated against her young body. Revenge for the murder of her father. And let’s be clear, John McCleary was thrown off of that hotel building, he didn’t jump.
And the second big question happened just after this scene. Nina and Joe went to a local diner, unsure of what to do now. Both were feeling the other out, when Nina said she had to use the bathroom. And while she’s away, Joe pulls out a revolver, and blows his own brains out. But, strangely? No one in the diner looks his way. No one flinches with the gun shot. What just happened?
Well, Joe didn’t actually kill himself. It was just another of his suicidal fantasies that he had been having throughout the entire movie. But this time, at his whit’s end, unsure of what to do with this child, unsure of what to do with his own life now… his mind slipped into the most fatal of endings. But Nina, would have none of it… “Joe, come on, let’s go. It’s a beautiful day outside.” And when Joe takes his head off the table long enough to realize that, in fact it is a beautiful day, he turns and repeats, “It is a beautiful day.”
Well, the ending is pretty open. But it seems to me to be saying, look these are two very very broken people. Both of them have experienced some of the worst things imaginable. They have seen death. They’ve caused death. They’ve seen the weakest of these be abused, squandered, and cased aside. And yet, here they stand. The future is theirs to make. Their future is going to be what the two of them make of it. Do they become a sequel to Luc Besson’s amazing movie, Leon: The Professional? with both of them on the hunt for child molesters the world over? Two ball-peen hammers leveling the playing field? Or maybe they just find a farm in Nebraska to retire to? Who knows.
But let’s be clear, Joe lost his mother, but gained a daughter. Joe’s demons of his past assumed failures were exorcised by his intervention on Nina’s part. Nina? Though she lost her parents through suicide and murder, found a father that would do whatever he has to do in order to protect her. (Quite possibly the most unrealistic part of the movie. Child services anyone? But I’ll give this utterly depressing movie one slightly optimistic overture.) Does that make sense?
Personally, this movie struck a chord. I know I’ve mentioned it in another review or two, but I’ve considered joining a tech team NGO doing work to use facial recognition to find sexually traffic girls. No, it’s not a ball-peen hammer wielding lunatic. But yeah, I’ve considered the thought of working more actively to save girls from these kinds of tragedies. And one of my larger moral failings is that I haven’t figured out how to help a friend of mine out who has a local shelter for sexually trafficked gals all up and down the front range. Just such a tragic thing.
So What is You Were Never Really Here About?
Congratulations, we solved the what. But not the deeper reason, or meaning. And I believe that we see a number of institutions abusing power gravely. We see border chaos. And children dying while being smuggled. We see a boy shoot another boy over a candy bar. We see state governors swallow children whole. It’s like this entire movie is an ode to systems of power gobbling up the disadvantaged and the disempowered.
And what about that title? You Were Never Really Here… what does that mean? It is a mini-poem, an ode really, to all of the lost individuals that had been made to disappear. Really? Don’t believe me? Think about it… if Joe hadn’t taken it upon himself to lay waste on behalf of the lost, who would have? In this movie? No one. We didn’t see a single person hunting for Nina.
So we get this feeling like, we are alone in this world, and the powerful will play with you however they will. And when they are done with you? They will cast you aside. This movie is a hostile and uninviting world that they live in. And yet, I don’t think our world that we live in is too much different from this. If you’d like to join me on a tour of the dark web, you might be shocked at what happens there. Chat with your local shelter for women released from sexual trafficking. Spend time on the periphery of a war zone. Meet with people charged with clearing land mines. But we prefer to avoid thinking about all of these unpleasantries. But thankfully, You Were Never Really Here reminds us of what we have been trying to forget all along.
Edited by, CY