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We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011)

Director: Lynne Ramsay

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77 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

British filmmaker Lynne Ramsay’s third feature after ‘Ratcatcher’ (1999) and ‘Morvern Callar’ (2002) is an adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s best-selling book of the same name, but there’s nothing remotely literary about Ramsay’s long-awaited comeback. She ditches the novel’s structure of an American wife, Eva (Tilda Swinton), writing letters to her husband, Franklin (John C Reilly), in the wake of their son committing a terrible crime, but keeps the book’s darting back and forth in time as we come to understand more of the woman, marriage and family that bore a killer.

Words firmly take a back seat in favour of the haunting power of image and sound as Ramsay turns Shriver’s novel into mesmerising and provocative cinema. ‘We Need to Talk about Kevin’ is intense, first-person storytelling as Ramsay and Swinton draw us into the head and world of Eva, just as Ramsay did with Samantha Morton in ‘Morvern Callar’. Yet there’s also a cutting portrait of a family at its heart that makes home life feel like civil war as Ramsay runs with Shriver’s bold ideas about the alienation of parenthood and its devastating effect on love and marriage. Only in its latter stages does the film settle down – a little – into longer scenes and the need to resolve what happened to Kevin. He’s played by a staggeringly creepy Ezra Miller, who inherits the same know-it-all, spooky demeanour of a younger actor, Jasper Newell, earlier in the movie.

The film is at its best in its first hour or so, when it is most daring. The opening sees Eva’s sleeping dream of being carried aloft at a Spanish tomato festival morph into a waking nightmare of her modest house being attacked with red paint. Tomatoes become paint until soon, via ketchup, there are hints of sirens and blood. Sound design is as rigorously and creatively employed: a prisoner’s scream turns into a baby’s cry turns into the wail of a drill.

The film is full of such clever, teasing juxtapositions as thematic links are made between past and present. A distant Christmas for Eva spent in the bosom of her family dissolves to Christmas present and her solitary life as a teen prisoner’s mother and public outcast. We’re never sure whether what we see is the reality of events or Eva’s memory of them. Context is limited and Ramsay’s take on this story is far removed from social commentary or explanation. This is a portrait of a family, channelled through the memories and feelings of the mother herself.

Ramsay challenges even Pedro Almodóvar for an evocative use of red and the look of her film, as shot by Seamus McGarvey, is fragmented, often blurry, close-up, full of detail, preferring to show Eva’s nervous feet as she exits a courthouse – Swinton is a physically awkward presence throughout – rather than her face. If some of the family scenes feel like a domestic war movie, with subtle talk of competitions and victories (‘Well, you won,’ says Eva to Kevin on the mini-golf course), others feel like a horror movie: a scene in which Eva drives through her area at Halloween is chilling.

‘We Need to Talk about Kevin’ is thought-provoking, confident and fearless. It’s experimental but never alienating and horrific in all the right ways. It’s great to have Ramsay back behind the camera after too long an absence. Bring on the next one.

Author: Dave Calhoun

Time Out London London Film Festival 2011

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User reviews of this film

JDH said...

Posted on May 30 2012 02:30 Disturbing. Brilliant cinematography. Psychologically well devleloped and thoughtfully considered. Excellent acting. The role of nurture is explored with subtlety and legitimacy. The role of nature, though, is ignored, but not dismissed. We're left to wonder what role it plays, and whether the much younger daughter who is so very different from Kevin is the product of a much improved and more mature nurture, a simple lack of colic for the mother to respond to and serve as a foundation for the parent child dynamic thereafter, or is it all the result of a different roll of the genetic dice. A must see movie.

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Monica said...

Posted on May 29 2012 03:05 This film was dreadfully disturbing. Yes it kept my attention but only to figure out what happened and why. And the ending was disappointing.

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Judith said...

Posted on May 16 2012 21:50 Unbelievably dissturbing. Curious. Did the mother create the monster by not being able to connect or consol a constantly crying baby or was the spawn just a sociopathic manipulative bad seed. What was difficult to understand was how the husband could not see Kevin's evil nature.

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Mark H said...

Posted on Mar 25 2012 04:19 The comment you tyJust watched it and while the story unfolds as expected and the subtext of blood symbolism is over used, 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' is deeply disturbing and thought provoking. I actually felt genuinely nauseas after watching this, which is significant as the only real violence shown was one woman punching another in the street and a little blood on bodies at the very end.
It does not attempt to address issues of inherent psychopathology, there is not the time and it is not the point of this specific interpretation of the tale. But it does invoke the question: are some people just born evil? Is it a form of brain damage, bad parenting or something more inexplicably insidious?
I have yet to have children, but have young nieces and nephews who are all very different. One is an angel thus far, another a rather difficult child to love despite near perfect parenting. The personal fear this brings to me and other prospective parents is, of course, what if I get a Kevin?

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urg said...

Posted on Mar 16 2012 07:35 Isn't it that she's growing somebody's son, not husband's?

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imara said...

Posted on Mar 06 2012 18:57 Deeply disturbing. This movie will haunt me for a while. Certain scenes are just too painful to watch and play over and over in your mind. I think it's an amazing movie which has been directed by a genius. At the end it of it all, you can't even hate the boy for his unspeakable crime, you sense that he is just a confused, damaged and disturbed kid who was obsessed with his mother. Reality seems to have finally sunk in and he will have to live with the guilt of killing so many but especially his father whom he seemed to love for the rest of his life. It also shows us the unbelievable and unconditional love a mother is capable of feeling for her offspring. It also shows us that as parents we should all be ultra sensitive to the nuances and the vibes kids may send out. Do not give bows and arrows to a kid with a latent penchant for violence and do not ask a kid with this type of evil undercurrent to watch over his sister! A truly horryfying movie. The world may seem like a dark and hopeless place for a few days after you watch this.......

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Donny Duke said...

Posted on Mar 01 2012 06:35 Even if the Film wasn’t named We Need to Talk About Kevin, a title that is open to the interpretation that the we referred to is not only the characters in the film but us, all of us, as we live in a crowded time when the phenomenon of a person going off and killing as many people as possible is becoming quite a problem, it would have its impact in shaping opinions in regards to how we view such a person, since this is not simply a pop art slasher film but something that tries to approach the fine art that a film can be, and with a little success it should noted. As such, skipping a lot of math here, our subconscious is libel to hang it in a more upscale underground gallery where it’s impressions on our conscious mind would be more readily taken note of, although pop art is no mere beggar in its impression on us either. Yes it’s told from the perspective of a mother, but the growing monster in the son seems “to counterpoint the …er…er…surrealism of the underlying metaphor of”* a mother’s experience as the subject of the film, to quote from a hugely popular pan-art work of last century we as yet have no idea how much has shaped the very idea of the search for meaning in art, and I mean that both ways. All joking aside, the film gives us a very chilling picture of the childhood of someone that goes off in that larger than life way a movie paints pictures, i.e. not so grounded in reality, but we, impressionable as we are -- maybe more so the less we think we are, but that’s an equation we don’t have the math for yet --, take it to heart as it were, and it becomes criteria with which we use in trying to figure out how to keep such tragedy out of our schools and our society, not the only criteria by any means, but certainly an influence. Now suffer to read the poem Looks Even Grimmer again with this in mind. I am sorry to put you through reading one of my poems (in these gotta get a word in edgewise days we also have the tragic/comic phenomenon of there being more people who consider themselves poets, and being quite social about it, than people who want to hear poetry, good or bad), but, and this is a subjective opinion of course, I shan’t think it as awful as “Ode To A Small Lump of Green Putty I Found In My Armpit One Midsummer Morning.”*
* The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
** Ibid.

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mark said...

Posted on Feb 29 2012 09:28 The fragmentation was intentional, as simplistic causality was stealthily avoided. The film is not intended to be a sociological/ psychological treatiseon the possible causes of psychopathological behaviour, it's an impressionistic rendition of a mother's experience of that phenomenon. As such, it succeeds

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Tim Harwood said...

Posted on Feb 28 2012 11:59 This film is one of the most chilling and yet superlative films I have seen in a long while. The acting throughout is exemplary and the visual narratives replave the epistolarly structure of Lionel Shriver's novel. It's a 5 out of 5 for this viewer

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Charlie McKay said...

Posted on Feb 13 2012 12:20 I thought that this was a brave, provocative and exciting film. Some people just don't like that. The film puts you inside of the nightmare of a mother who realises that she may have created a monster. It avoids becoming an issue film that addresses questions of parental responsibility and instead aims to immerse you in what feel like the tortured, fragmented memories of a woman who is both the victim and possibly the cause of the kind of evil that can and does result from the most fundamental form of neglect – the failure to love.

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Donny Duke said...

Posted on Jan 13 2012 01:59 Looks Even Grimmer
She saw me lookin’ at ‘er.
She gave it a son.
I’m saving a life.
Hello?
You call it stupid.
The eye of change,
I start baby.
I learned it in a Vietnam.
I’ve done some damage.
Empath,
That’s the menu.
Nobody’s exempt
From receiving empathy.
I’m gettin’ outta here.
That’s the immaculate Nazi hunter.
We’ve had enough of humans right now.
I’m talkin’ to you.
Is this medicated?
Talkin’ to him,
Talkin’.
Like a growing monster
In your opinion.
Whadda we do?
Usin’ our heads
Not our hearts
Cull the kid.
That’s important
They get identified.
I’m just
Kinda absolutely
Talkin’ about
Kevin,
The filmmaker’s son.
Do movies impregnate?
Splendid,
At least it’s understood
We’re dealin’ with inhuman beings.
Kill them Carl.
If you say so.
At the movies.

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Alfredo said...

Posted on Jan 05 2012 16:34 Why people keep talking about this film?. It's not worthy. First of all, it's too predictable , there's no narrative, no development of a story. Well, they take for granted that you already know what's about. But I didn't. I didn't read the book. Did the oriental kid kill all those persons with a bow and arrows. LOL !. In real life after the first arrow he would be knocked down by someone. Was the country music supposed to make us feel better?. What an awful film!!!

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John Sebastian said...

Posted on Jan 05 2012 15:47 I'm afraid you have very poor taste if you persist in thinking KEVIN is a great film. 77 films doesn't equal 77 great films, just 77 films. You people have no clue. Watch 'The Intruder' by Claire Denis of El Sur by Victor Erice and then come back to this discussion.

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john o sullivan said...

Posted on Jan 05 2012 12:24 I saw 77 fgilms last year and Kevin was great..along with Moneyball,Melancholia and the Artist among the best of 2011

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Marek said...

Posted on Jan 05 2012 11:45 Need to see a lot more films, eh John Sebastian? I happen to have seen a fair few, and this is a pretty good one. As for the rest of your e-mail, the less said the better

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