A Beautiful Day

Synopsis

“The film drop-kicks you into a cosmos of pain, depravity and blunt-force trauma with only the faintest flickers of light at the end of the tunnel. It’s not an experience to relish, exactly, but it’s still one that’s fully capable of blowing you away. The Scottish director begins this, her first film since We Need to Talk About Kevin in 2011, as she means to continue: with a series of swift, disorienting images, initially in a Cincinnati motel room. We see a man’s head, breathing in and out, inside a plastic bag. This is Joe (Joaquin Phoenix, with an unruly grey beard), and in the first proper look we get at him, he has completed whatever the hell his hideous business has been, and emerges, hoodie up, into a side alley. Joe rescues children from sex rings. He is hired to do so, not by the authorities, but private clients – typically the parents of teenagers who have gone missing, and who entrust him to do this vastly unpleasant job with speed, finesse and a willingness to bludgeon the perpetrators beyond repair. (…) Ramsay is far too serious a filmmaker to dwell on Joe’s brutal modes of dispatch. She and her editor, Joe Bini, find an amazing array of methods to conjure and intimate violence without lingering upon it: the film is a sustained masterclass in ghoulishness-avoidance.” (Tim Robey, The Telegraph)

Around The World in 14 Films 2017, presented by Ina Weisse