This movie has been in my watchlist for a long long time, and finally when I had some time to spare, and that too on my birthday, I decided to watch it. And man, was it such a disappointment!
You Were Never Really Here is well acted and well filmed. The movie looks absolutely gorgeous. But that's all there is to it. 'Gorgeous' is enough to grab your attention, but not to carry a movie. Everything besides the acting and the visuals were so pretentious it makes me nauseous. And I'm more than willing to blame it all on the writing, cos the writing in this movie just straight up sucked. It was like the whole movie was on its knees begging us the audience to believe that it's some sort of overly sophisticated work of art.
When you have a plot that ends up being so stupid with even the slightest bit of examination into the specifics, with a main character written to have literally every art-house 'tormented individual' cliche, and with dialogue like "Let's go because it's such a beautiful day" uttered with a straight face in any context and expected to be taken seriously... Yea, that's where I'm comfortable disregarding this movie altogether. No amount of long shots, silence, close-ups and deadpan facial reactions can make something appear "deep" when there's no meaningful substance to back it up.
And this so disappoints me, because I was really hoping for it to be amazing. I've heard nothing but good things about this movie, and I never would have thought it would be as pretentious as it was. Man, I miss the version of this movie I had in my head before I actually watched it.
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