Streaming Now: ‘You Were Never Here’

If “Joker” puts you in the mood for hard-to-watch portraits of Joaquin Phoenix’s physical and emotional degradation, a better choice is “You Were Never Really Here” - it opens with the actor asphyxiating himself in a plastic bag.

Phoenix plays Joe, an ex-soldier brutalist who has taken an off the books job rescuing kidnapped children (often wielding only a ball peen hammer and a roll of duct tape). In this tight 90-minute film, we see the end of one successful rescue and then the entirety of a second, which gets considerably messier.

Throughout, director Lynne Ramsey favors close-quarters shooting along alleys and stairwells, leaving us discomfited by the continual threat of violence just outside of the frame. Thanks to her wonderful economy of shots, Ramsey generates many unusual and exciting sequences, including one raid told entirely through static black and white security cam footage.

Although Joe cohabitates with his mother and is usually masked with a hoodie and beard, Phoenix delivers a more lived-in performance than he does while hamming it up in “Joker.” And when all the heavy, city-bound violence is interrupted by Phoenix taking a single, graceful plunge into nature, it sticks with you.