You Were Never Really Here (EOTWS)

End Of The Week Shorts #53 extract: You Never Really Here (2017)

Deeply enthralling and fascinatingly immersive, You Were Never Really Here feels very much so like the silent and slightly soft underbelly of Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Replacing actions with spaces, thoughts with inertia and conflict with abstract imagery, this is a basic thriller at heart. And in such it picks up the theme of protecting the weak and runs with it, which imbues the emotional subtext with hatred; a hatred for those who victimise the weak. Staying along this pathway, You Were Never Really Here wouldn't distinguish itself from the likes of Taxi Driver. However, by inverting its narrative, revealing hatred to, in this case, be a kind of fear that emerges from compassion, there emerges incredible catharsis of a very uncanny breed. 

Who is the true child, the saviour, the oppressed or the oppressor? 

Difficult to put into worlds, but a true pleasure to be lost in, You Were Never Really Here is an absolute must-see for anyone who takes cinema seriously.