We Need to Talk About Kevin
★★★★★
(2011)
Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, Movern Callar) returns after 10 years out of the film making world with what might turn out to be one of the greatest modern horror films ever made. A terrifyingly tense and measured version of Lionel Shriver’s infamous novel of the same name concerning a mother’s transferred redemption of her own life after her son goes on a high school killing spree.
It pulls no punches in working up a masterfully unbearable picture of a parent’s failure to connect with the one person we are told to love and who will love us unconditionally. It’s ferocity and bravery never faltering, forcing us to look at a life of a woman in a circumstance so brutal, all the while powerfully posing the question; What makes a monster a monster?
Again it’s Tilda Swinton’s “finest performance yet” as Eva, a once successful writer and wife, whose story is interwoven breathtakingly with her life after the horror. She’s swallowed, unemployed, hated, empty and wanting, her gaunt face carrying so much of the film’s focus as she mops up the red paint which is splashed on her house (probably weekly), a constant reminder of the slaughter she is “responsible” for. We see the birth of her son Kevin, his screaming, and fighting and her post natal depression affecting their relationship in wonderful set character pieces and, as Kevin grows, so does his disdain for his innocent and aghast mother and his little, well behaved sister, Celia (Ashley Gerasimovich). The games Kevin plays against Eva and her husband Frank (an impressively hulking John C Reilly) become more and more calculated and Eva’s belief in her own son’s sanity begins to be shaken.
A textured and twee use of sound and soundtrack is especially effective in twisting We Need to Talk About Kevin into really scary horror film territory; Swinton’s razor blade scraping blood red paint off a window isn’t a noise or an image you’re going to forget in a while and when its backed up with a Buddy Holly’s beautifully angelic voice, it’s effect is even more unsettling and cruel. In fact everything about Ramsay’s masterpiece is cruel and it hurts all the more because of it. The beauty of what, perhaps, could have been is constantly scratching under the surface of the film, turning every action of “present day” Eva into something filled with deep regret and failure.
As Ramsay and co writer Rory Kinner fold the pictures wandering chronology into a more traditionally shaped piece our little psychopath grows up into the staring, cold, morbid and oddly androgynous Ezra Miller, who matches Swinton’s numb shock with a gazing performance that is half lust and half boredom. The film’s laser accuracy as a portrait of a family treading water in the final third intensifies the ending so much it’s suffocating and afterwards, almost as unapologetically as Kevin himself, it turns it’s back on the audience and the “answers” and leaves us as lost, shocked and helpless as Eva.
Essential.
