We Need to Talk About Kevin

Five min­utes into Lynne Ramsay’s provoca­tive adap­ta­tion of Lionel Shriver’s unset­tling nov­el about the after­ef­fects of a Columbine-style mas­sacre, we are plunged into the sub­con­scious of the epony­mous killer’s moth­er, Eva (Til­da Swin­ton), in a bravu­ra dream sequence set in Valencia’s La Tomati­na festival.

Held aloft by a mass of writhing bod­ies, her wan skin stained with toma­to flesh, she glides grace­ful­ly to a part­ing in the crowd before being set down in a sea of red and con­sumed by it. It’s a pow­er­ful image: one rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the peace she longs to make with the life-shat­ter­ing events of her recent past.

Back in real­i­ty, Eva’s wak­ing world is sim­i­lar­ly bathed in red, though here it’s a hue sym­bol­ic of police sirens and bleed­ing bod­ies, not rebirth, that cov­ers her so com­plete­ly. Whether hid­ing from a griev­ing par­ent in a super­mar­ket, or scrub­bing, Lady Mac­beth-like, at paint thrown over her house by van­dals, she’s haunt­ed by it every­where she turns. This is a film so drenched in crim­son, it’s almost as if the neg­a­tive itself has been steeped in blood in some sort of macabre post-pro­duc­tion process.

Ram­say show­cased her tal­ent for visu­al sto­ry­telling and eye for arrest­ing images in her ear­li­er works Rat­catch­er and Movern Callar. It comes as lit­tle sur­prise, then, that she’s jet­ti­soned the source novel’s decid­ed­ly lit­er­ary nar­ra­tive device of pre­sent­ing Eva’s thoughts as let­ters writ­ten to her estranged hus­band. Instead, she places us direct­ly in the dis­traught woman’s head as Eva digs through her mem­o­ry search­ing for clues as to how and why she became the moth­er of a cold, dis­tant sociopath. It’s the nature ver­sus nur­ture argu­ment played out in a series of fraught, painful reminiscences.

Start­ing with the evening Kevin was con­ceived, Eva runs through her past in exhaus­tive, and exhaust­ing, detail. Through these flash­backs we dis­cov­er that her entire rela­tion­ship with her son has been gov­erned by a kind of hell­ish, pro­longed post-natal depres­sion. Ini­tial­ly unable to bond with him thanks to his non-stop cry­ing, refusal to speak and toi­let train­ing prob­lems, her resent­ment grows, reach­ing a seething peak when her good-natured hus­band (John C Reil­ly) con­vinces her to leave New York City and a suc­cess­ful career to help with Kevin’s development.

Inter­cut with these flash­backs are snatch­es of Eva’s cur­rent life, two years after the killings. Linked to her son’s crime by name and an infa­mous TV news­reel, she’s unable to escape the stig­ma of being the moth­er of the most hat­ed 15-year-old in the coun­try. Kevin con­tin­ues to be the dom­i­nant force in her life despite being locked away in prison.

Bor­row­ing heav­i­ly from the gram­mar of hor­ror films, Ram­say uses dis­ori­ent­ing angles, stalk­ing POV shots and grainy close-ups to mir­ror the tur­moil in Eva’s frac­tured psy­che. Her expres­sive direc­tion is matched by Swin­ton, fault­less through­out, pack­ing lay­ers of nuance and emo­tion into every sigh and scowl. Togeth­er they com­bine to form a har­row­ing por­trait of a grief-strick­en mind in free fall that is as com­pelling as it is disturbing.