Lynne Ramsay is fascinated with violence, but absolutely never, ever with glorifying it. The violence in her movie is never cool or badass, it only hurts. We spend far, far more time looking at the mental wounds violence has inflicted on the main character, physical wounds too, than actually seeing it carried out. In fact his big fight scenes are all elided, stunningly cut down into these dispersed stationary shots like you’re turning several pages of a book at a time, following along just behind him in the aftermath, or skipping ahead to spaces similarly devoid of action, just holding a bad promise. What it means is that this ultimately isn’t a film about violence after all, but a film about trauma. We don’t see any girls abused. We don’t see young Joe abused either, although the very present and troubling flashbacks make it clear his nightmare started early, and what he experienced in Iraq just continued the breakage that his father began.
