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BI<>H❝•1.🔗🖼Spoiler—

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• 
  @bharat273(45)· 2864d

  Hiii.. Gooddream

  Great Post with perfect review

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  @rodneysreviews(53)· 2864d

  "in my mind the movie's artsy methods rather than just telling the story, get in the way of the progression"

  LOL. Absolutely. That is not surprising. The filmmaker is arguably Britain's artsiest filmmaker, Lynne Ramsay, and this is her most commercial film.

  If I had do define in one word the major preoccupation of Lynne Ramsay, it is FRAGMENTATION. She doesn't believe in straightforward storytelling at all, but rather believes that we are all just a collection of fragmented memories and dreams, some of which implant themselves more deeply in our psyches than others.

  And of course, since the greatest fragmentation of human life is the one that divides life from death, she is obsessed with poetic images that surround and fragment the death experience.

  What is fascinating about this film is seeing what she does with a John Wick style revenge/hired killer type story.

  The first thing she did was hire the most fragmented actor she could find: Joaquin Phoenix. Ever since his older brother's surreal death on the sidewalk outside the Viper Room (I drove by the tributes and flowers, in my own fleeting fragmented Lynne Ramsay moment), Joaquin Phoenix has evinced behavior traits consistent with trauma, as well as open conflict and disgust with Hollywood conventions. Of course he was going to go deep when asked to play a suicidal ex-military guy, who lives with his mother.

  A genre-bending filmmaker like Park Chan-wook loves genre, so if he made this film, he might well dwell on the themes, but he'd also go hard on visceral excitement-filled genre action.

  By contrast, the artier Ramsay cuts the action out, showing only the fragmented images of CCTV at one point, and cutting the action completely, at another. Instead, her focus is on the before and aftermath. This is in sync with the title of the movie "You were never really here," which literally tells us that the "here" and now excitement, of the moment, are unimportant. To Ramsay, only the before and after reflections are important, as this mirrors the way our memories work, and our drowsy drifting sense of self. The theme song of the movie, Charlene's "I've Never Been to Me," which plays dreamily as Phoenix holds a dying man's hand, is all about never getting to grips with a true sense of self: it is about being fragmented and unresolved.

  In fragmenting flashbacks and flashforwards, Ramsay conveys the shattered minds of both Phoenix and the principal girl he sets out to rescue, one fragmented by war, one by abuse. Having both characters counting backwards, Ramsay fragments time, counting as if to a moment we never really reach, the reality of now.

  Ramsay fragments images, showing disembodied hands and legs and mouths of characters, reminding us that we may have a sense of being whole, but our parts exist separately, and tell their own tales.

  In her scattered and shattered presentation of scattered and shattered minds, Ramsay hopes to remind her viewers that we are all just bits of things, becoming other things, floating toward a death where parts of us still linger. Our real state is that of a shape-shifting consciousness.

  At the risk of boring you, Ramsay and Phoenix avoid giving you what you think you want from the genre, in the hope of provoking reflection on human experience and the nature of reality. Whether this artiness succeeds or not is a matter of taste.

  I'm glad there is a Lynne Ramsay. She's different, and in a world that produces a lot of the same, that's a good thing. :)

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• 
  @aydogdy(58)· 2864d

  You were never really here, and this is a kind of psychological game. The film is built in such a way that it always seems to the viewer that he was absent somewhere and missed something important. Therefore, the picture of events develops with difficulty. Therefore, at first glance, the banal thriller about the hostage turns into an innovative festival film. The viewer does not know and does not see more than the hero himself. Thanks to this confusion, horror, surprise rolls simultaneously on you and the screen character. Instead of words, the director uses a more eloquent language of editing. Inarticulate insertions of not the memories or the fantasies of the hero instill doubts in him and his own view of reality. Customers, criminals, fights, shown to us through surveillance cameras, seem almost abstract. In any case, it is obvious that the demonstration of cruelty is not an end in itself. Nevertheless, it is impossible to do without it when the hired killer rebelled against the world around him. I decided to struggle not only with crime, but also with the society of consumption as a whole. Start up to a certain point this battle remained passive, but after all, the killer reminds a bomb with a clockwork, and the reverse account began a long time ago. However, the essence of any struggle with the system is such that only one person will suffer from the explosion, which, perhaps, has never been here.

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