Lynne Ramsay’s 2018 psychodrama You Were Never Really Here does not directly use Aphex Twin’s music, but its mood and Jonny Greenwood’s score owe much to that electronic lineage. The Joaquin Phoenix-led thriller follows a contract killer hired to rescue a girl from a trafficking ring. Ramsay’s film is leaner and more immediate than some of her earlier work, yet it remains deeply unsettling—combining brutal action with slow, meditative moments that linger long after the screen goes dark.
Ramsay has said she was inspired by the spirit of Aphex Twin’s track “#3” when conceiving certain sequences. She and Phoenix were both mesmerized when she played the piece while storyboarding a shot of a crying girl in the street. Greenwood’s score channels that same tension: when a smear of blood collects in Joe’s (Phoenix) unkempt gray beard, the scene is deliberately unadorned—almost clinical. Instead of visual flourish, Greenwood’s music enters subtly: light synth percussion and uneasy tones rise as Joe’s face turns dark red, underlining the violence and the stakes without sensationalizing them.
After rescuing a girl, Joe finds she is quickly reclaimed by powerful forces. He narrowly survives an encounter with heavily armored hitmen, and then returns home to discover his mother shot in bed, silenced by a pillow. Flashbacks of a violent childhood intrude, reflecting the fractured memories and guilt that surface at unpredictable moments. Joe’s backstory as a veteran and former FBI agent is suggested rather than explained, hinting at a man who has tried—and failed—to contain his capacity for violence within lawful boundaries.
Rather than exploding in vengeance on finding his mother, Joe moves with grim composure. In the kitchen he confronts the two killers, shooting one immediately and wounding the other. After extracting information, Joe does something unexpected: he kneels, offers a painkiller, and holds the dying man’s hand. The tiled kitchen floor takes on a distorted crimson hue as the wounded man breathes his last. There is no immediate musical cue from Greenwood; instead, the scene finds its humanity through a shared radio moment—both men sing along to Charlene’s “I’ve Never Been to Me.” That quiet, ironic pop song becomes a strange connective tissue between perpetrator and victim, exposing vulnerability and drawing a fragile line between Joe and the man on the floor. The tenderness is shocking given the brutality we have already witnessed, but it also reveals Joe’s complicated moral compass: trained to kill, yet capable of small, human gestures that suggest remorse and longing for something like redemption.
A quieter, more subtle use of musical motifs appears in the scene where Joe performs an underwater burial for his mother. Up to this point, Greenwood’s score often punctuates action—highlighting surprise, accelerating montage sequences, or amplifying tension with synth textures. The burial requires a gentler hand. Joe wraps his mother in a black bag, weights her with rocks, and walks into a lake wearing a suit and tie. He places rocks in his own pockets as well, then, after recalling the girl’s uncertain fate, removes them and swims back to the surface. The piece Greenwood uses here, titled “Tree Synthesizers,” is a clear homage to Aphex Twin’s “#3.” Built around two shifting chords resolving to a third, it creates the sensation of finding dry ground after drifting at sea—an ambiguous, lullaby-like sense of closure that can read as finality or as a small step toward renewal.
The music here does more than underscore loss: it balances multiple currents of emotion—the mother’s death, Joe’s remorse, and the fragile possibility of rebirth. The resolving chord holds open the chance that Joe’s surfacing is not merely escape, but a decision to continue fighting for the girl he rescued. These layered emotional notes are typical of Ramsay’s approach: scenes refuse to be fixed as purely tragic or triumphant, and Greenwood’s score mirrors that ambiguity.
At key junctures between life and death, past and future, music carries remarkable emotional weight in You Were Never Really Here. “Tree Synthesizers” acts as a microcosm of Joe’s existence—repetitive, unsettled, but occasionally resolving. Ramsay’s film repeatedly sidesteps cinematic convention: violence is never glamorized; tenderness never feels unearned. Greenwood’s score neither sanctifies nor condemns Joe. Instead it engages with his contradictions—his capacity for brutal action and for surprising compassion—so the film becomes less a straightforward revenge saga and more an intimate study of a damaged man navigating moral complexity.
For all its brutality, You Were Never Really Here can feel oddly calming at times. That calm is not a denial of violence but a tonal choice that allows music and silence to probe the depths of Joe’s character. Scenes breathe, notes linger, and the film’s sparse, minimalist aesthetic leaves space for the audience to feel the full impact of what they are witnessing. In the end, Greenwood’s measured, Aphex Twin–inflected score remains integral to Ramsay’s vision—a sonic partner that deepens the film’s emotional resonance without ever overwhelming its stark, human core.
Written by Cole Clark
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