The film is framed with montages of apparently overheard conversations, chat with no apparent purpose, theme or coherence. If there is meaning to that collection it is elusive, especially when so many phrases are indecipherable.
That also describes the film, a powerful but elusive narrative centred on a compelling, damaged hero. Ex-GI Joe completes a mission to retrieve a senator's 13-year-old daughter Nina from sexual enslavement.
But it's not quite a character study and it is too enigmatic for a clearly defined thriller. I'd call it an expression of the spirit of the age, especially as it references today's callous nexus of sexual and political exploitation in America. It's the perspective of Scottish writer/director Lynne Ramsay.
A governor seeking re-election wastes many lives to recapture his favourite sex slave, the underage Nina. That corruption costs the lives of his supportive senator friend (Nina's father), along with Joe's boss, Joe's contact, Joe's frail mother and several incidental thugs.
While sensitively caring for his mother, Joe slips in and out of memories of his traumatic past, both as a Gulf War soldier and as the victim of an abusive father. His physical scars point to his psychological.
His bare-chested scenes show Joe to be a massive physical presence, not muscular but bulky. His build is augmented by the bulk the beard gives the already intense Joaquin Phoenix. It leaves him virtually no face to read. Joe's physical bulk is the opposite to Nina's pre-pubescent frailty.
But they share a common absence. Paradoxically, the very physical Joe is "never really here." He is emotionally detached from his existence, paralyzed by the past traumas which he has attempted to flee in self-asphyxiation. Similarly, Nina retreats into the silence and removal of a drugged stupor so she is "never really here" either. Both Joe and Nina count backwards as if their retreat from consciousness were anesthetically induced.
Telling details abound. In a miniature of Joe's emotional confusion, he finds a green jelly-bean, his favourite, then crushes it. Buried in a lake, his mother's long white hair escape the bag and float elegantly underwater. To bury her, Joe - suit and all - fills his pockets with rocks to deliver her to the bottom of the lake.
The pedophile governor fingers the furnishings of a toy dollhouse, even setting in motion a rocker (like the one he's off?). His luxurious mansion has a classical painting of a seductive woman with one breast exposed. The classical art is a cover for male-centred pornography, as the exposed woman is a cover for his obsession with the flat-chested girl.
The violence is both ubiquitous and tempered. Most of Joe's assaults are off-camera or shown obliquely through a security system. But we see him rip out a painful tooth, bloodying himself. As they chat, his agent litters his desk with tissues bloodied from his nose. In this world breathing means blood.
In this lawless America the only police we see are the ones who steal Nina from Joe, killing the hotel manager and Joe's connections. The governor has the power to commit and to hide his corruption. An elected government official assumes he is above the law - and his officials support that warping. (It's only a movie. Right.)
If the villainy is current America so is the trace of hope. The big macho hero doesn't save this day. The small abused teenage girl does. This is Me Too with a vengeance - and a political impact. After Joe entertains the despair of suicide, she returns trim and possessed and takes command: "Let's go."
The last shot is of the diner table Nina and Joe vacated. It's an image of calm, symmetry, a pallid assurance a world away from all the film's splattering. The victims have survived, escaped, saved themselves. As America yet may.