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We Need to Talk About Kevin Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: R (for disturbing violence and behavior, some sexuality and language) Genre: Drama, Thriller Theater release: September 28, 2011 by Oscilloscope Media Directed by: Lynne Ramsay Runtime: 1 hour 52 minutes Cast: Tilda Swinton (Eva Khatchadourian), John C. Reilly (Franklin), Ezra Miller (Kevin, teenager), Jasper Newell (Kevin, 6-8 years), Rock Duer (Kevin, toddler), Celia (Ashley Gerasimovich). Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

When Kathy Harris and Sue Klebold woke up on April 20, 1999, they could not have anticipated that before the day was through, their sons—Eric and Dylan—would be known throughout the world as the perpetrators of one of the bloodiest school massacres in American history. Nor could they have known that from that day forward, the world would look scornfully at them—the parents—as the culpable failures who raised such monsters. We Need to Talk About Kevin is about the sad and terrifying emotional terrain occupied by mothers like Kathy and Sue—mothers whose sons turned out horribly wrong. It's a harrowing look at the days before and after a Columbine-style massacre, told from the perspective of the teenage killer's mom.

In this fictional story, based on Lionel Shriver's 2003 novel of the same name and directed by Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher), the mother in question is Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton), and the son in question is Kevin—played at various ages by multiple actors, but most chillingly by Ezra Miller as teenage Kevin. The film cuts back and forth in time between memory flashes of the actual massacre Kevin commits in his high school, the aftermath years in which Eva tries to put the horrors of her past behind her, and a hodgepodge of memory vignettes from the raising of Kevin, who from birth was a "problem child."

Tilda Swinton as Eva Khatchadourian

Much of the film takes place in the past as Eva and her husband Franklin (John C. Reilly, in an rather bland, but appropriate role) raise their two kids in an unnamed-but-wealthy suburban setting. The firstborn is Kevin, a dark, angry boy who looks goth and has a passion for archery (red flag?). His little sister Celia (Ashley Gerasimovich) is quite his opposite: jovial, social, innocent. Though we known where the film is going from the get-go (Kevin perpetrating some sort of school massacre), the drama comes through our trying to understand why. What happens in Kevin's childhood that leads him to become a murderer? Are the parents at fault?

It's hard to find the right word to capture the tension of watching Kevin: unsettling, disturbing, horrifying, intense. All seem inadequate. It's a white-knuckle film, but not in the manner of a typical Hollywood thriller. There are no chase scenes or close-call escapes. There are only a few scenes of violence, and very little blood. It's not at all gruesome or explicit. But it's a far scarier movie to sit through than most zombie, exorcism, or slasher films you might see.

Ezra Miller as the teenaged Kevin

One reason is that as a character, Kevin is exceedingly creepy. In the film—that is to say, in Eva's memories—he is portrayed as a nearly demonic miscreant who from infancy exhibits malevolent and anti-social tendencies. He screams endlessly as a baby. As a toddler he refuses to be potty-trained, apparently to spite his mother. He curses and talks back to Eva as a first-grader. He destroys Eva's art room (her solace within the house). He terrorizes his innocent sister. Why? Is he evil at birth or did nurture somehow render him thus? Either possibility is chilling.

The other main force of the film's power is Swinton, an actress who throws herself into roles and certainly does so here. Eva is a deeply layered character, a conflicted woman who wants to be a good mother but also knows she isn't the best at it. A former best-selling travel writer who spent enticing summers in places like Italy and Spain (the opening shot of the film shows her writhing around joyously, and ominously, in blood-like tomatoes during La Tomatino festival), Eva never quite seems happy in domestic life. Motherhood for her is constraining, victimizing, deadening. Or at least that's how it looks from her perspective, in solemn retrospect.

Eva with young Kevin (Rock Duer)

Part of the curiosity of this film is its point of view. Everything in Kevin is a memory of Eva's—tainted by her own psychological and emotional issues (maternal guilt, grief, fear, loneliness). It's hard to know how much of her memories are objective and accurate. Did it really happen that way? Was Franklin really such a clueless, enabling father? Was Kevin quite so cold and reptilian, even from diapers?

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