Writer and director Lynne Ramsay has never taken the easy option. The director of prize-winning film festival favourites Ratcatcher (Chicago, Edinburgh, Ghent) and Morvern Caller (Toronto, Cannes, Stockholm), she has constantly challenged her audiences and herself.
We Need To Talk About Kevin is no exception.
It is Ramsay’s first feature for almost a decade – she spent more than five years after the success of Morvern Caller developing a low-budget adaptation of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. With the film rights changing studios, Ramsay became detached from the project. Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings trilogy) eventually directed the generally poorly received feature.
We Need To Talk About Kevin – the plot
In essence, We Need to Talk About Kevin is the ultimate horror story – that of a successful but disconnected family where things go tragically wrong: the mother-son bond breaks down so badly the boy becomes a killer.
In a series of non-linear scenes traveling backwards and forwards in time, Eva Khatchadourian (Swinton) must live and relive the horrific damage wrought by her teenage son.
The scenes are a slow reveal and demand close attention as to when key events take place in the narrative (clue: check the length of Tilda Swinton’s hair). From the time Kevin is a small child their relationship is fraught.
She is a successful travel writer turned publisher with husband Franklin (John C Reilly) a successful photographer. They give up their Manhattan loft lifestyle to provide an appropriate upmarket suburban home environment for their son.
But motherhood does not come easily to fiercely independent Eva. The central core question as to whether Kevin was born a monster or whether the maternal cold-hearted treatment from a babe-in-arms onwards made him so quickly rears its head.
John C Reilly has a seemingly normal relationship with his son. But the perfect suburban lifestyle goes horribly wrong, explaining the present day abuse Eva is confronted with on a daily basis.
Tilda Swinton
In spite of the title and the core action of We Need To Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay’s film belongs to Tilda Swinton.
Arguably her best and most mesmerising performance to date (and that is saying a great deal), the sparse dialogue-shy feature is visually expressionistic, presenting an almost catatonic woman living in the present confronting her own demons and actions of her son from the past.
It is she and she alone who shoulders the blame for the deathly behaviour of Kevin, running the gauntlet of a cohort of hate-filled town residents.
An almost silent nihilistic combat the mother-son battled until some two years before the opening of the film, Eva must now agonise over just what part she played in Kevin becoming what he became.
It’s just a pity that the husband and wife never did talk about Kevin.
Harrowing viewing, We Need To Talk About Kevin is one of the best films of the year - and leaves you wandering what Lynne Ramsay would have made of The Lovely Bones.
Personal rating: 4.5 stars
We Need To Talk About Kevin
- Directed by Lynne Ramsay (Morvern Caller, Ratcatcher)
- Written by Lynne Ramsay (Morvern Caller, Ratcatcher), Rory Kinnear
- Produced by Jennifer Fox (Michael Clayton, Syriana), Luc Roeg (Mr Nice, Let Him Have It), Robert Salerno (A Single Man, 21 Grams)
- Starring Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton, The Chronicles of Narnia), John C. Reilly (Chicago, Carnage), Ezra Miller (City Island, Afterschool)
Keith Lawrence - Published writer of articles in magazines, newspapers and websites, predominantly on culture, alongside ghostwriter/editor/copywriter.
