Review by Stuart Barr
Stars Tilda Swinton, John C Rielly, Ezra Miller, Jasper Newell, Rock Duer, Siobhan Fallon, Ursula Parker, Erin Maya Darke, Lauren Fox, Alex Manette
Written by Lynne Ramsay & Rory Kinnear
Certification UK 15 | US R
Runtime 112 minutes
Directed by Lynne Ramsay
It's every parent's secret nightmare, a fear so potent and disturbing that it is rarely acknowledged. What if you realised your child was an alien? Not alien in a hollywood extraterrestrial sense, but alien in the sense of unknowable, distasteful, disturbing. And what if that child committed an act of unconscionable evil? How would you cope? How could you recognise the signs? How responsible would you be if you failed to stop it?
This fear became a key disturbance to the psyche of the West, entering the cultural consciousness during the tumultuous 1960s as vast cultural and social fault lines caused by a new affluence among teenagers, the invention of the contraceptive pill and the rise of sexual freedom and experimentation, the vietnam war, the rise of pop culture, the civil rights movement, and so on. This upset to the status quo was eventually subsumed into the mainstream. But the 80s saw the terrible appearance of the AIDS virus, and what seems like a greater incidence of teen violence (or at least the mass media and the internet is creating the environment where such events are reported and appear more common).
These themes have commonly been the province of the horror genre, explored in metaphorical terms in classic films such as Children of the Damned, The Night Of The Living Dead, The Exorcist, The Omen, It's Alive, and many more pedophobic films. However Lynne Ramsay's film of Lionel Shrivers' bestselling and controversial novel is not an entry into the horror genre. Like Winter's Bone it uses and deals with concepts and themes common in genre films, but from an art-house drama perspective.
In We Need to Talk About Kevin, Tilda Swinton plays Eva, a successful and independent travel writer. When she becomes unexpectedly pregnant, her husband Franklin (Reilly) is delighted. Eva is less excited, worrying about the effect of a baby on her career and independence and feeling alienated from the joyousness of other mothers in her pre-natal group. After the birth of Kevin, Eva is clearly suffering from post-natal depression, and struggles to cope with motherhood. In a key scene, unable to stop the baby from crying she wheels his pram next to a street worker using a pneumatic drill. As industrial white noise drowns out the child she achieves a moment of beatific peace before being seized by guilt.
Ramsay creates an atmosphere of dread and tension from the start by intercutting between flashbacks and flash forwards. We see Eva before, during and after the pregnancy. We also see her some years later, living alone in a cheap house, suffering abuse from random people in the street. Clearly something terrible has happened, but Ramsay will only reveal the true nature of events over the course of the next two hours. What we do note are that things shown to us in early scenes that are notable by their absence later.
Once the initial shock of the Nick Roeg-esque editing strategy wears off (Roeg's son Luc is one of the film's producers), the film develops into two interweaved story lines. One, the story of Kevin, and Eva's fractious maternal relationship with him. The other the story of Eva alone and broken, trying to survive in an environment openly hostile towards her. These two threads are there for the audience to knit together.
This is an outstanding film, and a superb return to filmmaking for Ramsay. Swinton delivers a stunning performance as Eva, making you feel for a character Hollywood film executives would call "unsympathetic". It is an awards season performance, expect to see her gather a truckload of nominations. As the teenage Kevin, Ezra Miller is quietly terrifying in a performance that could be a star maker. The film is also greatly aided by a subtle score from Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood. But the real star is Ramsay, returning to directing after a long (and unhappy) absence, this film shares the daring visual style of her earlier Ratcatcher and Morven Callar, but marries this to a compelling narrative that makes for a film that could cross over from the art-house to mainstream success. It is however, despite a disdain for conventional shock tactics, one of the most disturbing films of 2011.