Movie Review: You Were Never Really Here

With rare exception with some movies like Gladiator in 2000, Joaquin Phoenix has been making low budget art movies throughout his career. Most of this is admirable because its obvious that he is not interested in the money, only the art form of making movies. His new movie "You Were Never Really Here" is another example of one his art movies and this film is unusual in many ways including the story telling and the over the top method of showing flashbacks to explain the action and the main character's abusive childhood.

Like the recent movie Traffik this film deals with the tragedy of human trafficking. Joaquin portrays a man whose job it is to find young girls who have been abducted and return them to their families. This story is about one abduction that becomes far more involved and violent than others he has done in the past, although the details on the reasons behind why all of this is happening is never explained. In other reviews I have done in this blog in the past, I have said several times that its one thing try something new but if that idea is too off the wall or doesn't make sense, then this is not a movie I will review positively. You Were Never Really Here is pretty close to going off course but for the most part, the movie made sense and was not too strange to give a negative review.

I give a marginal recommendation to You Were Never Really Here.