The ball-peen hammer is a blunt-force instrument, yet the hole it leaves in a human skull is surprisingly tidy. That much, at least, is what we are led to believe by writer-director Lynne Ramsay’s striking film You Were Never Really Here, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as Joe, a hirsute, hammer-wielding bundle of hurt—a hired retriever of kidnapped children who is himself covered in the many scars of a damaged upbringing. In its own quiet and sidewinding way, Jonny Greenwood’s exceptional score is as surprising as Ramsay’s film. It is as calmly brutal as Phoenix’s dead-eyed shuffle, and as tender as the way Joe clasps the hand of the dying man he has just dispatched with a bullet to the gut.
You Were Never Really Here is a film about violence and men and power. It is also, in its own uncomfortable way, a film about love, duty, and compassion. Greenwood’s score responds with remarkable restraint, refusing to over-dramatize yet never shrinking from the fundamental sadness—and strangeness—of Ramsay’s world. Departing sharply from the baroque piano compositions of his 2018 score for Phantom Thread, Greenwood cycles mainly between three principal modes here. The album’s bookends are gentle mood pieces for swelling synthesizers and strings. Then there are severe, atonal fugues that make the most of the orchestra’s spectral properties, detuning the strings until they throw off the dull pewter gleam of a migraine. Most surprising of all, he fires up his banks of electronics on several tracks, approximating coldwave or proto-techno.
The score plays up all of those contrasts, sometimes within the course of a single track. After the verdant opener, “Sandy’s Necklace” begins like Sonic Youth tuning their guitars before easing into a murky sort of funk—swinging groove, plucked guitar—fleshed out with orchestral percussion and a bleak string melody. But “Nausea,” which follows, could almost be LCD Soundsystem demoing a rickety New Order cover. It’s a coiled study for synth and drum machine, which, along with its out-of-time drums, is the closest thing Greenwood has composed for a movie that sounds like a Radiohead song. A few tracks later, he returns to the uneasy electronic mood with “Dark Streets,” a John Carpenter-like sketch whose shifting pulse mimics Ramsay’s own jittery storytelling: While Joe’s steely focus drives the film’s pacing, the narrative is pocked with grim flashbacks and even grimmer glimpses of a kind of alternate reality, as though we were witnessing his psychotic break from behind his own heavy lids.
Greenwood flirted with harsh dissonance in his score for 2007’s There Will Be Blood, but his string arrangements here up the otherworldliness by an order of magnitude. With ethereal drones, he evokes 20th-century avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis’ shimmering music of the spheres, and with relentless slashing and sawing motions he channels the dull ache of self-loathing; one late cue sounds like the early-20th-century German composer Paul Hindemith tackling Psycho’s shower scene. (The reference may be intentional: Hitchcock’s film plays in the background of an early scene, and in a darkly comic moment, Joe even does his best impersonation of those iconic stabbing strings.)
In the context of the film, Greenwood’s writing is remarkably unobtrusive. When Joe gets behind the wheel, the new-wave flavored tracks are used in a way that is stylish and propulsive, but for long stretches of the film, the score falls silent, making way for Paul Davies’ hair-raising sound design, as well as some inspired AM-radio staples (“Angel Baby,” “I’ve Never Been to Me”) whose incongruity only heightens the film’s tension. The soundtrack wisely opts to leave those out; heard here, they would lose their counterintuitive power and break the eerie, bruised mood that Greenwood so skillfully evokes. The restraint of his score is a testament to his interpretive abilities, but even as a standalone album, You Were Never Really Here is an engrossing listen.
