We Need to Talk about Kevin: short film review by Julie Clarke

Poster: http://www.imdb.com/media/rm2576724480/tt1242460

After seeing We Need to Talk about Kevin (Lynn Ramsay, 2011) this afternoon, the words on my lips were ones I'd often heard when I was a child: Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child. And, although I don't believe in hitting children, I do believe that they should be disciplined so that they can learn appropriate behavior. We Need to Talk about Kevin is a psychological thriller about the relationship between Eva (Tilda Swinton) and her son Kevin (Ezra Miller), but it is also about both parent's complicity in forming the child into the young, psychopathic adult, who is selfish, manipulative, ruthless and feels absolutely no guilt for his inappropriate and destructive behavior. At the beginning of the film I felt sorry for the young Kevin because I thought he was demonstrating characteristics of autism, which just didn't suit the middle-class Eva living in her beautiful house in the country.  Indeed Eva's husband feels that she is way too hard on the child, who he readily forgives. But later I realized that Kevin was not slow, but was cleverly manipulating his mother and even so, I became unsympathetic to her since she appeared too weak to counter his attempts to control her. From the onset the director uses different time frames, flash backs and interesting montage to create the notion that Eva is unfit for mothering or of coping with her insecurities and anxieties.  In her frustration and inability to change Kevin's behavior she throws him against a wall, breaking his arm.  And, in another scene she recounts that, prior to Kevin's birth she was happy. Indeed, we are lead to believe in so many ways that Eva is not only complicit in Kevin's behavior, but may well be the cause of it, for so often throughout the film visual clues provide a correlation between them.  In a scene at the beginning of the film Eva dunks her face into water in the bathroom basin. Since the camera is placed below the basin so that we may clearly see her, we are surprised that her face suddenly morphs into that of her child. This correlation between Kevin and his mother is evident in the scene in which Kevin is being visited by his mother in jail. He sits silently in front of her and systematically bites the top of each finger-nail and places each small, white nail on the table in front of him. A subsequent scene demonstrates that Eva has purchased a dozen broken eggs, simply so that she can escape quickly from  a person she does not want to see in the supermarket and is later shown eating  her cooked scrambled eggs and placing pieces of white egg-shell onto the table in front of her. Throughout the film there is an illusion to blood - blood ties and blood rites. The first few frames of the film contain an aerial shot of a vast crowd of people indulging in an orgy of squashed tomatoes. It is a reference to the festival of La Tomatina in Buñol in the Valencia region of Spain, in which about 150,000 tomatoes are thrown.and there is complete abandonment to the moment. The scene and entwined bodies within in represents unbridled passion, which is demonstrated more fully by the conclusion of the film in which Kevin is responsible for a bloody school massacre. The ruddy colored squashed tomatoes on naked flesh is continued throughout the film as stain: the smeared red paint on Eva's house, car and face and eventually on the  blood smeared bodies.  Tilda Swinton and the young Ezra Miller are absolutely convincing and brilliant in this film, which asks us to consider whether the kind of evil that can produce a murderer is innate or whether a of lack of compassion for human life is one that is learned.  Eva is shown to be ambivalent about Kevin's birth and mothering in general and yet she is shown at times to be loving and concerned with the welfare of her children.  I feel that audiences will be torn in their conclusions about nature, nurture and the roots of evil and may be left for days debating who in fact is responsible for such dire events.  I saw this film at the Rivoli Cinema in Camberwell, with complements of Experimenta Media Arts who provided me with the ticket.