Joe, a traumatized veteran who doesn't fear violence, uses his knowledge and training to save people from dangerous human trafficking networks. When one of his jobs gets messed up and he loses control of the situation, Joe's nightmares start to consume him as a conspiracy unravels. It can either lead him to wake up from the nightmare or to the death’s path. A conflict between the present and the memory of the past, and the way the past influences the present, dominates “You Were Never Really Here”, with the untamable Joaquin Phoenix embodying a wounded animal in free fall. As in “We Need to Talk About Kevin”, here what is most important often happens on the margins and is not shown but only alluded to. The narrative linearity itself is not always clear, there is a sensorial disorientation that reveals itself as a rewarding puzzle: now pessimism and the denial of redemption give way to the search for some kind of salvation, a delicate glimmer of hope. (JA)