Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is startlingly confident, visually arresting film-making, but God, it’s a tough watch
“I want you to tell me why” says Eva Katchadourian to her son towards the end of Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. It’s the question the audience has been asking all the way though the film.
Why is Kevin’s relationship with his mother so hostile?
Why does Kevin do the horrendous things he does? Why does Eva persevere in visiting her son and staying in a town which has rejected her?
Thematic queries aside, director Lynne Ramsay’s third feature is startling and compelling viewing. We Need to Talk About Kevin demonstrates the same visual lyricism Ramsay demonstrated in Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar, but made even more dream-like with a restricted colour palette and skilful overlapping of sounds and images.
The film follows Eva [Tilda Swinton], in the years leading-up to and following her teenage son’s crime, flitting back and forth between her memories of Kevin’s childhood and the aftermath of his atrocity. Present-day Eva is a shell; lonely, ostracised, and haunted.
We Need to Talk About Kevin’s opening scenes establish the impressionist symbolism Ramsay uses throughout. Bosch-like bodies writhe in blood-red juice as Eva is born aloft Christ-like, on the shoulders of revellers. The scene is a flashback to a traditional Spanish tomato festival attended by Eva, formerly a successful travel writer, which just happens to look like a massacre. Subtlety isn’t part of Ramsay’s remit.
The blood-red motif is present all the way through the film, visible against mostly white backgrounds, either on the front of Eva’s vandalised house (she’s continually playing Lady Macbeth, scrubbing red paint from her hands), on emergency exits in a white corridor, or on a child’s inflatable ball. Eva and Franklin’s first-born, Kevin [Ezra Miller], is even conceived in a claret-red light. It may sound heavy-handed, but the film’s sensationalist subject matter and subjective narrative are a perfect fit with its exaggerated colour scheme.
We Need to Talk About Kevin’s use of sound is similarly metaphorical and startling. Soundtracks are overlapped from scene to scene, some moments being scored by the sound from another entirely. A crowd screaming in pain and shock is exchanged for one bellowing with applause, the thud of a crossbow bolt arriving at its destination swapped for a cheerleader’s chant. Sound riddles are set for the audience early on and solved only as the stomach-churning conclusion is revealed.
Initially, We Need to Talk About Kevin seems like a brilliant study of subjectivity. From infancy to adolescence, the audience sees Eva and Franklin’s son Kevin as a monster. He deliberately and diabolically foils Eva’s every attempt to be a parent, exhibiting a devious intelligence that’s consistently out of step with his years.
Pregnancy, so often fetishised as a thing of beauty on screen, is horrible to Eva. A room full of expectant mothers is shot so the sea of baby bumps appear like distended parasitic tumours. The act of birth distorts Eva horribly into a grotesque version of herself, as reflected in the Francis Bacon-like disfigured image reflected of her face in the stainless steel lampshade above her hospital bed.
Eva feels that her infant son’s lack of cooperation is premeditated rather than a natural part of child-rearing, so that’s how the audience sees it. When baby Kevin screams for hours, then is immediately pacified by his father’s touch, it’s seen as an intentional strike against Eva, part of an ongoing vendetta.
When Kevin as a toddler refuses to play a simple ball game with Eva, then assents, and then, noting the relief his cooperation gives her, refuses once again, both Eva and the audience see it as a deliberately staged attack rather than the actions of a fickle child. In our eyes and hers, Kevin exists only to reveal, manipulate, and exploit Eva’s flaws as a mother.
Kevin’s sustained provocation of his mother stretches the limits of credulity. No child would behave that way, you tell yourself. It makes sense when you realise the film, like the book, is told from Eva’s perspective, one skewed by the irrationality of post-natal depression. Had Lynne Ramsay directed, or indeed, Lionel Shriver written, Eva’s husband’s version of We Need to Talk About Kevin, we’d be seeing things very differently indeed, without the miasma of Eva’s paranoia and resentment.
An event occurs which complicates that reading however, when Kevin commits an act so horrific Eva is proved sickeningly right in her suspicion and mistrust of her son. It’s at that point that We Need to Talk About Kevin asks its chicken and egg riddle: what came first, Eva’s inability to bond with Kevin, or Kevin’s malevolence? Was Kevin corrupted by his mother’s rejection, or did she reject him because he was corrupted?
Ramsay plays upon the theme of Eva having created Kevin in her own image by graphically twinning the two on screen. Swinton and Miller share a same hair-cut, pallor and expression. Mummy’s little monster indeed.
You really can’t throw enough superlatives at the film’s cast. Tilda Swinton seems like the only actress with the steeliness, intelligence and coldness required to play Eva, a character who sways between being deeply unsympathetic, even misanthropic at times, to being vulnerable, the victim of a tragedy.
Whether Eva is a victim of, or indirectly responsible for Kevin’s actions is something that divides the townspeople who surround her. Ramsay caricatures Eva’s neighbours and colleagues, giving them a sit-com shine on screen. Cheap and tacky, the women are all hairspray and nails while the men are clueless and badly dressed. Besides the shared plot connection, the townsfolk seem as if they’ve arrived from satirised world of DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little. It makes sense when you remember we’re watching first-person cinema, seeing through the eyes of Eva’s upper middle-class arrogance and prejudice.
John C. Reilly is heartbreakingly good-natured as Eva’s husband Franklin, her inferior intellectually, professionally and in appearance. Reilly is so likeable as Franklin, you’ll wish he’d turned up in a different film so he could be on the receiving end of a different fate than the one he’s dealt here.
The casting team really earned their wage, not only by finding an ideal Eva and Franklin, but by selecting a chillingly well-cast series of little Kevins. Ezra Miller though, as fifteen year old Kevin, is the film’s real discovery. Miller’s performance is reminiscent of Marlon Brando’s in Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire or Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, prowling around the sets with a destructive smirk and utterly self-assured glower.
Like the film’s exaggerated colour and impressionistic use of sound, Miller’s performance could be accused of verging on the pantomimic, did it not work so well for the character. Miller makes Kevin horribly enjoyable to watch, just as there was something horribly attractive about his character in Shriver’s book. He draws your eye in every scene, proving himself more than a match for the rest of the film’s striking visual style.
One surprise was how disarmingly funny Ramsay’s film is at times. The audience I was with laughed, more than once, at Kevin’s recalcitrant childhood behaviour and sly sense of humour, as if we were watching scenes from a sit-com. Ramsay invites us to enjoy the character, making for a very uncomfortable watch indeed. Talk about a guilty pleasure.
We Need to Talk About Kevin is an astoundingly confident film which does what only the best literary adaptations can: it creates an autonomous version of its story, quite distinct from its source, and one which could only exist on screen. You’ll leave feeling as if you’ve swallowed a lead weight, but it’s worth the discomfort.
Why is Kevin’s relationship with his mother so hostile?
Why does Kevin do the horrendous things he does? Why does Eva persevere in visiting her son and staying in a town which has rejected her?
Thematic queries aside, director Lynne Ramsay’s third feature is startling and compelling viewing. We Need to Talk About Kevin demonstrates the same visual lyricism Ramsay demonstrated in Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar, but made even more dream-like with a restricted colour palette and skilful overlapping of sounds and images.
The film follows Eva [Tilda Swinton], in the years leading-up to and following her teenage son’s crime, flitting back and forth between her memories of Kevin’s childhood and the aftermath of his atrocity. Present-day Eva is a shell; lonely, ostracised, and haunted.
We Need to Talk About Kevin’s opening scenes establish the impressionist symbolism Ramsay uses throughout. Bosch-like bodies writhe in blood-red juice as Eva is born aloft Christ-like, on the shoulders of revellers. The scene is a flashback to a traditional Spanish tomato festival attended by Eva, formerly a successful travel writer, which just happens to look like a massacre. Subtlety isn’t part of Ramsay’s remit.
The blood-red motif is present all the way through the film, visible against mostly white backgrounds, either on the front of Eva’s vandalised house (she’s continually playing Lady Macbeth, scrubbing red paint from her hands), on emergency exits in a white corridor, or on a child’s inflatable ball. Eva and Franklin’s first-born, Kevin [Ezra Miller], is even conceived in a claret-red light. It may sound heavy-handed, but the film’s sensationalist subject matter and subjective narrative are a perfect fit with its exaggerated colour scheme.
We Need to Talk About Kevin’s use of sound is similarly metaphorical and startling. Soundtracks are overlapped from scene to scene, some moments being scored by the sound from another entirely. A crowd screaming in pain and shock is exchanged for one bellowing with applause, the thud of a crossbow bolt arriving at its destination swapped for a cheerleader’s chant. Sound riddles are set for the audience early on and solved only as the stomach-churning conclusion is revealed.
Initially, We Need to Talk About Kevin seems like a brilliant study of subjectivity. From infancy to adolescence, the audience sees Eva and Franklin’s son Kevin as a monster. He deliberately and diabolically foils Eva’s every attempt to be a parent, exhibiting a devious intelligence that’s consistently out of step with his years.
Pregnancy, so often fetishised as a thing of beauty on screen, is horrible to Eva. A room full of expectant mothers is shot so the sea of baby bumps appear like distended parasitic tumours. The act of birth distorts Eva horribly into a grotesque version of herself, as reflected in the Francis Bacon-like disfigured image reflected of her face in the stainless steel lampshade above her hospital bed.
Eva feels that her infant son’s lack of cooperation is premeditated rather than a natural part of child-rearing, so that’s how the audience sees it. When baby Kevin screams for hours, then is immediately pacified by his father’s touch, it’s seen as an intentional strike against Eva, part of an ongoing vendetta.
When Kevin as a toddler refuses to play a simple ball game with Eva, then assents, and then, noting the relief his cooperation gives her, refuses once again, both Eva and the audience see it as a deliberately staged attack rather than the actions of a fickle child. In our eyes and hers, Kevin exists only to reveal, manipulate, and exploit Eva’s flaws as a mother.
Kevin’s sustained provocation of his mother stretches the limits of credulity. No child would behave that way, you tell yourself. It makes sense when you realise the film, like the book, is told from Eva’s perspective, one skewed by the irrationality of post-natal depression. Had Lynne Ramsay directed, or indeed, Lionel Shriver written, Eva’s husband’s version of We Need to Talk About Kevin, we’d be seeing things very differently indeed, without the miasma of Eva’s paranoia and resentment.
An event occurs which complicates that reading however, when Kevin commits an act so horrific Eva is proved sickeningly right in her suspicion and mistrust of her son. It’s at that point that We Need to Talk About Kevin asks its chicken and egg riddle: what came first, Eva’s inability to bond with Kevin, or Kevin’s malevolence? Was Kevin corrupted by his mother’s rejection, or did she reject him because he was corrupted?
Ramsay plays upon the theme of Eva having created Kevin in her own image by graphically twinning the two on screen. Swinton and Miller share a same hair-cut, pallor and expression. Mummy’s little monster indeed.
You really can’t throw enough superlatives at the film’s cast. Tilda Swinton seems like the only actress with the steeliness, intelligence and coldness required to play Eva, a character who sways between being deeply unsympathetic, even misanthropic at times, to being vulnerable, the victim of a tragedy.
Whether Eva is a victim of, or indirectly responsible for Kevin’s actions is something that divides the townspeople who surround her. Ramsay caricatures Eva’s neighbours and colleagues, giving them a sit-com shine on screen. Cheap and tacky, the women are all hairspray and nails while the men are clueless and badly dressed. Besides the shared plot connection, the townsfolk seem as if they’ve arrived from satirised world of DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little. It makes sense when you remember we’re watching first-person cinema, seeing through the eyes of Eva’s upper middle-class arrogance and prejudice.
John C. Reilly is heartbreakingly good-natured as Eva’s husband Franklin, her inferior intellectually, professionally and in appearance. Reilly is so likeable as Franklin, you’ll wish he’d turned up in a different film so he could be on the receiving end of a different fate than the one he’s dealt here.
The casting team really earned their wage, not only by finding an ideal Eva and Franklin, but by selecting a chillingly well-cast series of little Kevins. Ezra Miller though, as fifteen year old Kevin, is the film’s real discovery. Miller’s performance is reminiscent of Marlon Brando’s in Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire or Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, prowling around the sets with a destructive smirk and utterly self-assured glower.
Like the film’s exaggerated colour and impressionistic use of sound, Miller’s performance could be accused of verging on the pantomimic, did it not work so well for the character. Miller makes Kevin horribly enjoyable to watch, just as there was something horribly attractive about his character in Shriver’s book. He draws your eye in every scene, proving himself more than a match for the rest of the film’s striking visual style.
One surprise was how disarmingly funny Ramsay’s film is at times. The audience I was with laughed, more than once, at Kevin’s recalcitrant childhood behaviour and sly sense of humour, as if we were watching scenes from a sit-com. Ramsay invites us to enjoy the character, making for a very uncomfortable watch indeed. Talk about a guilty pleasure.
We Need to Talk About Kevin is an astoundingly confident film which does what only the best literary adaptations can: it creates an autonomous version of its story, quite distinct from its source, and one which could only exist on screen. You’ll leave feeling as if you’ve swallowed a lead weight, but it’s worth the discomfort.
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