Never Here (2017)
Disturbing events lead an artist who photographs
strangers to suspect that someone out there is watching HER. Boundaries
blur between real and imaginary, crime and art, the watcher and the
watched.
Director:
Camille ThomanStars:
Lines blur between real and imaginary, crime and art, the watcher and
the watched in this eerie, genre-subverting exploration of identity.
Installation artist Miranda Fall (Mireille Enos) follows and photographs
strangers for her art until disturbing events lead her to suspect that
someone out there is watching HER...
Country:
USALanguage:
EnglishRelease Date:
18 June 2017 (USA) See more »Also Known As:
You Were Never Here See more »Company Credits
Technical Specs
Runtime:
Color:
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Trivia
Sam Shepard's final film after his passing on 27 July, 2017.Camille Thoman's feature debut is a haunting Lynchian mystery featuring the late Sam Shepard in his final big-screen role.
Performance artist, documentarian and editor Camille Thoman has
assembled an impressive range of talents for her narrative feature
debut, an atmospheric indie psycho-thriller with shades of Lynch and
Hitchcock. The Killing star Mireille Enos plays the lead, Sam
Shepard makes his final screen appearance and Zachary Quinto has a
credit as exec producer. Vexing, disquieting, willfully opaque in
places, Never Here had its European premiere at Oldenburg
International Film Festival last week. Vertical Entertainment is
planning a limited U.S. release Oct. 20, with a pay TV launch to follow
on Starz in early 2018.
Enos stars as Miranda Fall, a New York-based conceptual artist whose
latest gallery show uses images and locations purloined from a lost
cellphone. This invasion of privacy outrages the phone's original owner,
Arthur Anderton (David Greenspan), who ominously warns Miranda "you did
a bad thing" at the launch party. Later that night, back at her
apartment, Miranda's art dealer and secret lover Paul Stark (Shepard)
witnesses a stranger assaulting a woman in the street outside. Covering
for Paul, who is married with a sick wife, Miranda tells the police that
she saw the attack alone, sketching a likeness of the suspect based on
Paul's description.
The case falls to detective Andy Williams (Vincent Piazza), who just
happens to be one of Miranda's old flames. Although the sexual chemistry
between them still sizzles, Andy becomes increasingly suspicious of
Miranda's account of the assault. In a further, fateful coincidence, it
transpires that Miranda also knew the victim and possibly the attacker,
too. She becomes obsessed with one of the nameless suspects (Goran
Visnjic) after picking him from a police identity parade, tracking down
his address and creeping around his empty apartment, risking her safety
on the spurious alibi of preparing a new art project. Meanwhile, an
elusive mystery man appears to be shadowing Miranda's every move in
return. Or is she losing her grasp on reality and stalking herself?
Never Here wears the outer clothes of a crime thriller to
cloak a more haunting, disturbing, open-ended rumination on voyeurism
and identity. Thoman cites Paul Auster's textually tricksy New York
trilogy and the Alfred Hitchcock classic mystery The Lady Vanishes
as influences, even including a short clip from the latter and naming
one of her minor characters after its star, Margaret Lockwood. But
Thoman's film is more than a cerebral exercise in homage. It also works
on the visceral level of a nightmarish mood piece, mostly unfolding in
underlit interiors that clearly invoke the shadowy occult realm of Lynch
more than Hitchcock.
Thoman's playfully arty touches include highlighting details with red
circles on screen, and deploying Jenny Holzer-style neon slogan
artworks as visual clues. She repeatedly implicates the viewer as voyeur
with mobile camerawork that prowls and jerks and hovers uncomfortably
close to characters, mimicking the stop-start motions of a stalker.
Visual focus is deliberately blurry in places, amplifying the theme of
identity melting and dissolving. James Lavino's score is a patchwork of
sonic unease, sprinkled with non-diegetic drones and crackles, another
Lynchian touch. Thoman also loops and layers snippets of dialogue, using
them almost like musical motifs.
Ending without firm narrative closure, Never Here is
possibly too subtle for its own good, refusing to spoon-feed audience
expectations with neat explanations and satisfying shock twists. Its
self-consciously cryptic style will alienate some viewers, and arguably
becomes overly mannered in places, veering more toward art installation
than movie. It is sometimes unclear whether Thoman's narrative knots and
muted emotional shadings are the result of smart novelistic
game-playing or simple inexperience.
Even so, Never Here manages to remain engrossing throughout
despite minimal violence and none of the sexualized female victimhood
that drives most stalker thrillers, an admirable subversion of genre
tropes. Enos gives a finely calibrated performance as Miranda, an
apparent mystery to herself, her deadpan surface confidence masking
submerged psychological trauma. And Shepard is reliably classy in his
final screen role, still wolfishly handsome on the cusp of 70 but
emphatically low-key, generously underplaying his icon status. On this
evidence, Thoman has sufficient ambition and technique to fuel a
fascinating future career behind the camera.
Final rating: 8/10 for the genre and 5/10 overall, but please pay attention here to the genre rating which states again that this movie is a good example of how a thriller and the performance of the actors have to be.
Thanks for reading and have fun watching movies.
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