Rating: ****
We Need to Talk About Kevin reminds the viewer that you don’t need a chainsaw and hockey mask to
feel truly terrified by a movie. The horror in the film is nothing less than
the abyss behind the eyes of a sociopath, and how one lives with the fact that
everything they knew and loved is gone, how you know you’re somehow to blame,
and how you knew, before all others, that something like this was bound to
happen. Knowledge is the true horror of We Need to Talk About Kevin, and
human emotion is the blood and guts spilled.
In an incredible performance, Tilda Swinton
plays Eva Khatchadourian. Through the film’s disjointed narrative we see that
Eva was something of a free spirit. We first see her literally being carried
away during Tomatina, and through other small flashbacks and lines of dialogue
we come to be under the impression that she enjoys travel, and not being tied
down. We see brief glimpses of her courtship with Franklin (John C. Reilly),
and the two marry and later give birth to their son, Kevin. More than the
typical trials of motherhood, Eva has difficulties connecting to Kevin, and
those difficulties aren’t completely one sided for Eva.
I’m not sure at what point we understand
the fault with Kevin, one might even say its spoiled in the title of the film,
but gradually we come to understand that Kevin has some deeply dark tendencies.
Even as a child. I don’t know where they found the child actor to play Kevin in
his early years, but he should be given serious Oscar consideration, or maybe
serious psychological help. One of the two anyway. Ezra Miller as the older
Kevin has a difficult task all his own: how does he portray Kevin’s growing
sociopathic tendencies while still being a boy a mother would work hard to
redeem? However he does it, Miller is seriously fascinating to watch, and a
little terrifying too.
But make no mistake, this is Tilda
Swinton’s movie and it is a tour de force performance that she gives. We see
Eva through the frustration of being able to have the kind of bond with her
baby that a mother expects with her son. We see her in anger as Kevin tests her
patience and pushes her to the breaking point. We see her frustration with Franklin and his
inability to see the growing darkness in their son. Then we flash-forward post
tragedy. We see her as a pariah. We see her try and make some human connection.
We see her used and abused. And we see her relish the smallest victories, like
getting a job as a secretary.
The circumstances around what Kevin did are
left murky in the details until nearly the very end of the film. Director Lynne
Ramsay weaves wonderful bits of foreshadowing in stray lines of dialogue and a
seemingly omnipresent sound of lawn sprinklers. As much as the film offers no
answers, it really offers no questions either. The film is edited in a mesmerizing
way, the different scenes ebb and flow together across the storyline of the
film is a thing of beauty; it’s disjointed but it all makes sense in the end,
and what you’re left with is a sense of what disaster can come out of a single
human life, and humility and humanity of a mother’s love.
Without a doubt, We Need to Talk About
Kevin is one of the most powerful works at this year’s Toronto
International Film Festival, a work that tests the mind and the spirit. After
the film ended, I found myself revisiting it in my own head, not so much
reliving certain scenes, but more like my a feeling that I was bond in this
kind of static state of mind. People like Kevin exist, and they have parents
and people who loved them and tried to reach them, but there was just always
something. In tragedy, we desperately want to someone to blame and it’s usually
the person closest to the source. Ramsay dares to remind us that sometimes
there’s no explanation for tragedy, and usually there’s more than one type of
victim.
We Need to Talk About Kevin demands to been seen at least once.
