We Need To Talk About Kevin is a descent into madness, so don't say you weren't warned.
What we have here is every parent's worst nightmare come true. Depending upon who you ask, the film is either the story of a sociopath or it's the story of a mother who couldn't bond with her child; maybe it's both. It doesn't matter. You can't know anyway. At any rate, Tilda Swinton stars as Eva, the mother of a disturbed teenage boy who is involved in a tragedy. In the aftermath, Eva attempts to sort out her contribution to his aberrant behaviour.
The film, which is based on Lionel Shriver's best-selling novel, moves back and forth in time and plays out like a domestic thriller. The audience is often called upon to play detective, to put the pieces together and to order events in time.
We meet Eva as a young woman, rising Christ-like from a sea of churning red material that proves to be not blood, but tomatoes. She's at a Spanish harvest festival of some kind. It's a flashback, a dream, a reverie; whatever it is, she awakens to the cold truth about her life now.
Here, life now is alone. Flashbacks introduce her husband (John C. Reilly), her little daughter and her son, Kevin, a difficult and colicky baby whose life seems to have taken his mother by surprise. We see Eva's exhaustion a new mother, and we hear Kevin screaming as a newborn. And screaming and screaming.
And screaming.
We meet him again as a recalcitrant toddler, as a willful and defiant little boy, as a cruel and manipulative teenager. And we meet Eva, who appears to have become a spectator in her own life. She and her husband move to the suburbs to accommodate their children, she gives up her work, she stops travelling. She does not attempt to hide her resentment from Kevin.
By the same token, she never stops trying to parent him, either. It's an uphill battle, and Kevin reserves his worst behaviour for mother.
We Need To Talk About Kevin is a difficult film to watch. Filmmaker Lynne Ramsay uses her camera like a scalpel; she is aided and abetted in her task by a unsettling score from Jonny Greenwood. The film investigates the world of parenting in a fashion far removed from the usual candy-coated vision of mommies-and-babies-in-love.
The film involves spectacular performances, particularly from Swinton as Eva and from Ezra Miller as the adolescent Kevin. The fact that Swinton is not nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for this film certainly adds to the general impression that the Academy Awards have become a huge waste of everyone's time.
We Need To Talk About Kevin is filmmaker Lynne Ramsay's first film since 2002's Morvern Caller. Boy, was it worth the wait.
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