Seven years ago Scottish director Lynne Ramsay ushered us, along with a very tired-looking Tilda Swinton, into the disturbing world of Kevin. Among other themes, We Need to Talk About Kevin was a cold, hard look at the warped mind of a killer.
Ramsay's damming statement on America's weaponised culture was curiously (and perhaps more strikingly) made with the absence of guns. You Were Never Really Here is no different as it follows a "hired gun", who plies his trade with a ball-peen hammer.
Although one should know never to take a hammer to a gun fight, Joe who is played by a very beefy-looking Joaquin Phoenix certainly knows how to swing one.
When a senator's daughter, Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov) goes missing, Joe finds himself embroiled in a twisted ring of underage sex trafficking. Nina's traumatic upbringing holds a mirror to Joe's own, elevating his mission to a vigilante cause.
Living with his frail mum, Joe keeps to himself and one of the film's lighter moments humorously acknowledges his similarity to Psycho's Norman Bates. Indeed, Ramsey's psycho-dramatic take on crime does in many ways resemble a modern-day Hitchcock as she dives deep into Joe's subconscious.
