The first thing we hear in You Were Never Really Here is a countdown, ticking away to reveal an image of someone being asphyxiated with a plastic bag. So you know right off the bat that this isn’t going to be a feel-good movie.

What filmmaker Lynn Ramsay has done, however, is yet again take what should be miserable stuff — in this case the underage child sex trade; before it was a high school massacre in We Need to Talk About Kevin; before that suicide in Morvern Callar — and infuse it with her singular identity. Her film is very stripped back in terms of story, but nonetheless beautifully made.

This is the story of Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), a hitman-of-sorts with a reputation for being brutal to those who deserve it. Joe is hired by a politician to rescue his daughter from a paedophile sex slavery ring with just a hammer and an expert knowledge of the lyrics to Charlene’s “Never Been to Me”.

“All The Animals Come Out At Night” – Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver

You Were Never Really Here has many great attributes, but its best is its economy. The film is a lean, mean 90 minutes. Any ounce of unnecessary fat on its bones has been trimmed and thrown in the garbage. It’s a better movie because of this.

As if expecting people to make the comparisons to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Ramsay gets out ahead of them. The atmosphere that permeated that 1976 masterpiece, one of low-life skeeze and dread, is all different here.

Her NYC is scum, yes, but on the outside it is sunny and golden, far from oppressive. Here, the city has evolved from its filthy nostalgic peak of the ‘70s and ‘80s and has covered up its rotten core with a modern, clean veneer. I don’t think it’s all that rich to say it evokes toxic masculinity — still rampant and prevalent, but now simply covered up by online anonymity and bare minimum public decency. Here the animals don’t just come out at night, they walk around in the daylight disguised as gentlemen.

Ramsay doesn’t allow the cinematic thrill of watching a bad guy get his comeuppance, but rather focuses on the grisly aftermath — whether that be physical (a gunshot wound to the head, blood on an innocent girl’s hands) or emotional (in a drowning sequence visually evocative of The Shape of Water, of all things).

The editing here is really exquisite and never more so than a home invasion sequence told exclusively through strategically-placed security CCTV cameras.

It’s Not Just A Man’s World

That’s not to say You Were Never Really Here isn’t inspired by the likes of Taxi Driver, or any number of grimy crime thrillers from that era. Adapted from a novella by Jonathan Ames, which was likely inspired by the works of Andrew Vachss and Mickey Spillane, Lynn Ramsay is simply telling this sort of story in a different way. And while she may cringe at the idea, the fact that Ramsay is a woman is an important part of that.

It would have been easy for a director to tell this story with all of the gruesome hammer poundings and throat slashings, to have shown the horrific sexual violence inflicted upon its young female characters, and given us humanising back-stories for every immoral character in the fim. This could have easily been 145 minutes and a laborious, sadistic chore. That Ramsay avoids this is not only smart from a storytelling point of view, but a cultural one, too. We don’t need to see acts of horrific sexual assault or learn about their perpetrators’ pasts to be emotionally invested.

If there is perhaps one major criticism I have of the film it is that the dialogue can occasionally get lost in the mix. Sometimes the often-mumbled dialogue — including at one point a very major plot development shared on a kitchen floor (keep an ear open!) — gets lost between Phoenix’s thick beard, the blood-gurgling baddies and the score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, which is equal parts elegant and bombastic.

Made In The U.S.A.

Perhaps the most integral shot of the film is also its wittiest. When shopping for supplies, Joe picks up a hammer emblazoned with the words “MADE IN U.S.A.”

It’s not subtle, but it’s smart and could easily get lost in the memory to all the scenes where Joe actually uses the hammer. Ramsay is British and the story of You Were Never Really Here isn’t unique to America. Not at all. The illegal sex trade of women of all ages is disgustingly far too prevalent everywhere in the world. But it is an important moment, however small, because it says something about the America of today. It’s not a grand statement, but it’s poignant in representing how easily we have all come to accept everyday violence from the nation that is supposedly the leader of the free world.

Here, those three words represent the nostalgia of America’s past, the nation that built itself up to become the most powerful in the world, and twisting that warped sense of pride into that of the violence that the hammer is about to inflict. If Joe’s weapon of choice were a gun, the gag would have been too on the nose and not at all becoming an artist of Ramsay’s intelligence. As it is, it represents how any country’s sense of nationalism can ultimately be insidious.

As America crumbles into its self-afflicted moral decay (joining Australia in the caging of children and families), You Were Never Really Here feels like a film very much for the contemporary age, where we cannot avoid the scarring no matter how much we close our eyes.

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You Were Never Really Here screened at the 65^th Sydney Film Festival. It will open in limited release in August.

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Glenn Dunks is a freelance writer from Melbourne. He also works as an editor and a film festival programmer while tweeting too much at @glenndunks.