In a household where the son has grown up to become a mass murderer, is he to blame, or are the parents the ones at fault? We Need to Talk About Kevin delves into this subject as a broken mother is forced into every parent’s nightmare: raising a sociopath.
Based on the 2003 novel with the same name by Lionel Shriver, the film focuses on Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton), a mother who is being constantly harassed by her son Kevin (Ezra Miller). She is pushed even further as no one sympathizes or cares to hear her out. Not even her own husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) who doesn’t believe anything she experiences, all of which comes together when Kevin goes on a murderous rampage.
The acting is the best part about the film as Swinton evokes the despair and inner anguish she has to face with her crumbling household while Reilly knows how to be both charming and unsettling with his love for his wife and kids and his refusal to have Kevin be painted as a villain. Miller also does a great job at looking detached from the real world, unimpressed with anything life can offer him, though a large chunk of my issues with this film are about Kevin himself.
There are some thrills to be had with Kevin’s unpredictable behavior but this shouldn’t have to be designed to be like a horror movie with Kevin as the killer that can’t be reasoned with. The character never has the potential to be a nice kid as he is painted as an evil child from the very start.
Director Lynne Ramsay really goes overboard when it comes to having props. Colors in particular tell the story for us as if symbolism is enough to get a movie off its feet. Red, often used as the color of blood or rage, is used ad nauseam as everything surrounding all of the characters is red. White and yellow are used as signs of both purity and illness, giving the film an excuse to constantly have eggs being destroyed; get it? Because the egg is supposed to be Kevin.
Overall, it’s is a film that should have taken itself entirely seriously as we do see the inner turmoil of Eva taken much more seriously, but there was nothing that could have been done with Kevin. He’s established as The Terminator in the flesh from the very start. It makes it hard to empathize with him when he is completely obsessed with ruining his mother’s life. The only way I’d recommend this film is if you were taking a film class and needed a topic to write an essay about. The film, at the very least, does its best to throw enough symbolic meaning and character study fodder to write an entire thesis on what the director thought she was doing with the film.
We Need to Talk About Kevin is playing from now until March 15 weekdays at 5:25, 7:00, and 9:40 pm.
