Movie Review

We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011) 

A story about Eva Khatchadourian a mother dealing with the consequences of her sons actions in the murder of his father, his sister and many members of his school. While she is visiting him in prison we are introduced Kevin through her memories of him growing up and are shown her struggle to love her clearly disturbed child. We Need To Talk About Kevin has been dubbed a “suspenseful and gripping psychological thriller” but has failed to live up to some of the hype as the whole movie lacks thrills in the conventional sense with its achingly slow build up and only a couple minutes of anything truly gripping close to the end but it still manages to be a fantastic film that will get under your skin and keep your attention.

Although flawlessly acted by both Tilda Swinton with her heartbreaking vulnerability and Ezra Miller’s skin crawling creepiness (also props to John C. Reilly who stepped out of his usual comedic character to perform in a more serious role) the movie ends refusing to give you any real answers to the events and leaves you with even more questions. As the movie is shown through Eva’s memories as they come to her in the present day we get this slightly scrambled and choppy view of the whole picture giving the movie an unstructured feel that can sometimes be confusing and frustrating as it jumps around the time line.

The use of the colour red is noticeable throughout. The opening scene is a dream sequence where Eva is participating in La Tomatina a tomato throwing festival where all the squashed tomatoes make it look like she is covered in, and surrounded by blood. In the next scene she wakes and is trying to wash away red paint from the outside of her house and car that later you conclude has been vandalised by angry neighbours that by no surprise also looks like blood. There are many more scenes like this of Eva cleaning red from her house and her hands that Ramsay has added throughout the movie that could be the blood Kevin has shed, left Eva to deal with and try to clean up but the film has a noticeable lack of any actual blood.

We first meet Kevin as a teen in prison and are then shown his story at three pivotal points in his life that hold experiences that could be to blame for his actions. Some of these are drawn out scenes with very little dialogue or music and are usually so deafeningly quiet that the silence makes you uncomfortable but keeps you glued to the screen as you wait for that shock that never seems to come. At age six to eight we see Kevin portrayed by the incredibly talented Jasper Newell and is shown to be uninterested in everything and manipulative toward his mother and father. When we are introduced to teenaged Kevin portrayed by the hauntingly fantastic Ezra Miller who plays Kevin in an insufferably charming yet disturbing way Eva has become increasingly worried about Kevin’s behaviour as she blames him for the disappearance of his sister Celia’s pet and the loss of one of her eyes in an accident with a household cleaning solution but does not take her worries further as Franklin insists he is innocent showing that the title is right and they really do need to talk about Kevin.

 Taking into account all the minor grievances with this movie it does truly mess with your mind and get you thinking about the argument of Nature vs Nurture and although some parts feel unnecessary and flat they all draw together in the end to leave you stunned not only by the fantastic performance from the actors (Ezra Miller is definitely one to watch) but by how a movie with so little words can make such a powerful impact.