Joaquin Phoenix assumes a hooded, bearlike presence in “You Were Never Really Here,” a disquieting urban thriller directed by Lynne Ramsay. As Joe, a taciturn hit man whose specialty is rescuing young women who have been abducted and forced into sex trafficking, Phoenix is a lurking, skulking bundle of anxieties and retributive obsession, a dangerous mash-up of Holden Caulfield’s beneficent alter ego in “The Catcher in the Rye” and “Taxi Driver’s” haunted Travis Bickle.
In fact, “You Were Never Really Here,” adapted from a 2013 novel by Jonathan Ames, owes more than a passing debt to “Taxi Driver,” with which it shares an unsettling depiction of unresolved trauma, urban claustrophobia and male redemption predicated on female suffering.