We Need to Talk About How Much I Disliked We Need to Talk About Kevin

My taste in movies is fairly broad, but I definitely veer more toward the feel-good end of things, and I try to avoid films with an overabundance of violence. However, sometimes someone else picks the movie, and I’ll wind up watching something I never would have picked on my own. Sometimes I’m glad I took this venture into darker territory, sometimes not. In the case of We Need to Talk About Kevin, the latest such film I viewed, I’m definitely not.

This movie, which was written and directed by Lynne Ramsay, stars Tilda Swinton as Eva Khatchadourian, a cowed, disturbed woman who spends most of the film looking severely traumatized. We’re not quite sure why at first, though a safe guess is that it involves the titular Kevin, her son. The movie is incredibly disorienting, hopping around in time every few minutes, and at first I had a very hard time following it, though I eventually grew accustomed to the different time periods and could usually tell which one we were in by looking at Eva. If not, a glance at Kevin was sufficient, since we see him as an infant, a toddler (Rock Duer), a young child (Jasper Newell) and a teenager (Ezra Miller).

Of course, since Eva, not Kevin, is the central character, there are a number of scenes in which he does not appear, but most directly involve him. Each of the actors portraying him is startlingly skilled at conveying Kevin’s sociopathic tendencies. Even at the age of three or four, this child is frightening, and it’s little wonder that Eva does not relish the time she spends with him, though it is a wonder that she doesn’t aggressively seek psychiatric help for a child with such obvious emotional problems. Then again, she does not have the support of her affable but oblivious husband, Franklin (John C. Reilly), who tunes out any of Eva’s protests that Kevin is an atypical boy, in part because Kevin acts differently around him than he does in her company.

Once I got used to the movie’s nonlinear format, I had a better understanding of how it was building toward one grand traumatic event by showing us ever more unsettling scenes from Kevin’s life, along with a few from before his birth and several that occur after the calamity in question. We don’t know precisely what happened until quite late in the film, but it becomes easier and easier to guess as the scenes progress.

I nearly always find Reilly very likable in his roles, and at first I did here too, but at a certain point, Franklin’s complacency and refusal to take any stock in his wife’s concerns became deeply frustrating. Eva is icy and distant with her son and never bothers to hide the fact that she resents his presence in her life. In fact, she tells him this to his face when he is a toddler. However, in the end, it’s hard to say which parent bears more responsibility for the fact that he just continues to grow more and more cold and calculating, seemingly taking pleasure only in defiance and destruction.

Miller is particularly chilling, reminding me of Sterling Beaumon’s performance as a teen serial killer in Criminal Minds. The title reflects the deep communication rift between Eva and her husband, to say nothing of the total lack of useful interaction between her and Kevin himself, and one wonders whether talking to and about Kevin more effectively could have led to his turning out well-adjusted and sociable. These are the sorts of questions that the sixth Harry Potter book explored about Voldemort, and there’s no easy answer. This is a kid whose life revolves around openly tormenting his mother, deceiving his father and subtly terrorizing his gentle little sister Celia (Ashley Girasimovich). How much of that was preventable?

Both parents here have their issues, but it’s hard to see how any parent could cope very well with the seething malice that Kevin displays from his earliest years, so it’s not clear whether the film is advocating more checked-in parenting or just trying to scare the heebie-jeebies out of anyone who’s ever considered becoming a parent. In the special features, author Lionel Shriver notes that her novel was inspired largely by her examination of her long-held disinterest in motherhood, leading me to lean toward the latter. The friend I watched it with concluded that the message was, “Don’t have kids; you never know what you’re going to end up with.”

If that is indeed the conclusion we are meant to reach, then the film certainly succeeded for me, and I sure wish I could go to sleep without the scarring images from this movie rattling around in my brain. The movie is horrifying and revolting, but I don’t think my strong negative reaction is enough to classify this as a cinematic triumph. It stuck with me, but I certainly didn’t enjoy it, and the only talking about Kevin I want to do now is warning people off it unless they like having their stomachs churned.