We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

Director: Lynne Ramsay

Parents usually cite their number one goal to be to raise their children to be great people who are better than their parents were. In We Need to Talk About Kevin the complete opposite of that happens, and we see a mother grappling with the question of why this happened and what went wrong. In this film the titular Kevin ends up going to jail for a Columbine-like massacre at his high school, but it's not about him, it's about his mother and the complicated issues she goes through. It's a horror movie for parents.

The movie has a fractured narrative, in the sense that we see Kevin's mother, Eva, played by Tilda Swinton, during her life after the massacre, and we frequently flashback to scenes from before the Massacre. We go from Kevin as a baby all the way till the massacre, but the scenes of his mother in the present day are necessary because they establish that the scenes we are watching in the past are not exactly objective. Eva is a mother who is questioning whether or not it was her fault for what Kevin did. Through the flashbacks we understand that Eva is going through an inner conflict. Eva lived a fantastic life as a travel writer before Kevin was born, and having a baby seemed to have made her life a lot more dull, something she did not like at all. Part of her feels guilty for that and possibly sees her disdain for the child as the reason this happened. But we also see that Kevin is a pretty horrible kid in the flashbacks, so it's possible that this was an inevitable act that was bound to happen no matter how Eva raised him.

Lynne Ramsay does an incredible job at establishing the dread-filled mood that accompanies Kevin in every scene. Every horrible thing he does is highlighted completely because we see Kevin as Eva sees him. Ramsay infuses the film with the color red, because thats the color that stands out to Eva as she reminisces about her killer son. We Need to Talk About Kevin is a movie I hope to watch again someday soon because I'm not sure I was ready for the bait-and-switch it does by seeming like its based on realism, and then ending up completely and incredibly subjective. But as I reflect about the movie more, I find it a greater and greater achievement that puts us smack dab in the mind of a tortured mother.

Grade: B+