We Need to Talk About Kevin
Tilda Swinton leads an excellent cast in a thoughtful and deeply disturbing adaptation of Lionel Shriver's novel.
What happens when bad children happen to good parents? Does it mean they are not, in fact, as good as they had imagined themselves to be? With these questions, British director Lynne Ramsay has created a nihilist tale of guilt and horror. Working with co-writer Rory Kinnear, she has adapted Lionel Shriver's prizewinning 2003 novel – whose much-spoofed title is now part of the language – about a woman whose teenage son Kevin has committed a Columbine-style massacre.
The novel's title is of course ironic, as they never truly get around to the earnest discussions it proposes. In fact we see before us the supposedly constructive, canalising parental activity that leads from reading Robin Hood as a traditional bedside story through children's bows and arrows to a lethal crossbow and the brief, reflective transformation of the pupils of Kevin's eyes into archery targets.
What American Psycho was to consumerism, We Need to Talk About Kevin is to both sexism and feminism, a brilliantly extreme parable, operatically pessimistic. In the end, the audience is left with the same unanswerable question: what made Kevin do it? Nature or nurture? A mother supplies both. Kevin is flesh of her flesh and perhaps an inability to judge him is her awful biological destiny.
It is tremendously acted by Tilda Swinton (a performance to put aside her protective mother in David Siegel and Scott McGehee's 2001 thriller The Deep End) and by Ezra Miller, with inspired images from cinematographer Seamus McGarvey.
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