Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch You Were Never Really Here
2017 · Lynne Ramsay · You Were Never Really Here on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the flash images: a hand through a grate, shoes, feet. (cutting)
They arrive with no date and no place, cut in mid-scene by Joe Bini without warning or explanation. They never assemble into the backstory a thriller usually owes you.
Payoff: You get the texture of a wound rather than an account of it. The film declines to explain the man by explaining his past.
Notice how often the frame holds only a hand or a surface. (camera)
Thomas Townend shoots in extremes: an extreme close-up that gives partial information, then a wide that leaves Joe small and far away. There is almost no neutral middle distance.
Payoff: Feeling is registered on a body and never discharged into a clean action, so you read Joe off his hands instead of his face. In the reading: affection-image. The reading calls these close-ups affection-images: an emotion held in the gap between seeing something and doing anything about it.
Watch Joaquin Phoenix breathe and count in moments of quiet. (performance)
Phoenix gained substantial weight for this. He carries the part through stillness, hand position and breathing rhythm, with very little dialogue. The scenes with his mother run on small acts of maintenance.
Payoff: Flesh here is something to be managed rather than used. The same man does the violence and the caretaking with the same hands.
Listen for where Jonny Greenwood's score stops and the room starts. (sound)
Prepared piano and abrasive strings bleed into traffic, radio and static without announcing themselves. A cheerful easy-listening record turns up under a scene of real sadness and is left to grind against it.
Payoff: Sound and picture tell you different things at once, which is a fair description of the man you are watching. In the reading: audiovisual disjunction. The reading calls this audiovisual disjunction: the track and the image running separate stories so inside and outside stop being distinguishable.
Notice you see the approach or the aftermath, not the blow. (staging)
Ramsay fragments the hammer work into pieces and withholds the connective action. Violence gets displaced into a reflection, a sound down a hall, a body already on the floor.
Payoff: Showing it whole would make it pleasurable in the way this genre usually makes it pleasurable. The withholding is a decision about what you are allowed to enjoy.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Notice how little happens and how much you feel anyway. The gap between those two is the film.