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Review

If you're sitting at home, wanting to give We Need to Talk About Kevin a watch, but afraid that you will not be able to handle the unrelenting horrors and building tension, fear not: it's not nearly as rough as you've imagined. Whether this is a net positive or negative is a question of perspective, but what's more than clear is that co-writer/director Lynne Ramsay is not interested in crafting a film anyone expected.

The story follows a woman named Eva (Tilda Swinton in a top notch performance) who gradually comes to terms with the fact that her son Kevin may be a psychopath. Actually, gradually may not be the best word choice. In fact, the boy is clearly disturbed, different and highly unpleasant from his infancy on. With his non-stop, aggressive screaming, Eva is quickly led to the end of her rope and resorts to standing with her stroller by jackhammers and other excessively loud power tools just to drown out the noise. It doesn't work. Eva remains in this state of "oh dear, I'm afraid my son is evil, but I don't know what to do about it" for the majority of the movie, all while her husband (John C. Reilly) remains pig-headedly oblivious to the rapidly mounting warning signs.

Eventually, a horrific act of extreme violence is committed, though our revealing this is not a spoiler. In fact, while Ramsay is able to leave one or two twists and surprises for the last act of the film, a non-linear structure that jumps back and forth from the postscript to the beginning to the middle essentially reveals the majority of the story within the first 20 minutes of the film. The rest is waiting for the horrors to be more clearly fleshed out. This unconventional structure creates a distancing effect that removes the majority of the tension viewers expect from a story like this. Adding on to this distancing is Ramsay's filming style. While she clearly implored both her set decorator and her director of photography to incorporate the dramatic and foreboding color red as often as possible, most scenes feel as if they're being filmed and staged for stylistic effect, almost as if Ramsay would've preferred to screen this work in fragments on a series of monitors in an art gallery. This is all great if her only intention was to offer a little directorial dazzle to those who normally eschew uncouth things like narrative filmmaking, but its effect on the storytelling is a net negative.

Narrative and emotional deficiencies aside, there is a lot that's great about We Need to Talk About Kevin. Swinton explores every aspect of anguish, fear and self-doubt that the script allows her to. All three young actors who play Kevin at various ages do an uncanny job at portraying the facial expressions and physicality of a compassionless sociopath. Even Ramsay, who clearly needs to learn to restrain her talent in service to story, shows flashes of directorial genius that prove she could end up a filmmaking legend if she can learn a little discipline. All of these strengths definitely position We Need to Talk About Kevin as a film worth a screening, but none of these can compensate for the fact that viewers are left sitting for 112 minutes, alternatively tense with anticipation and bored that they essentially know the entire story and just have to wait until it's fully fleshed out. Combine this lack of narrative excitement with the almost total lack of insight the production offers on what forms a child into a psychopath and it's almost as if Ramsay wants to frustrate our expectations at every turn. For every two indicators that Kevin was born bad and there was nothing anyone could do about it, we get one indicator that his descent into total evil was hastened by some poor parenting decision his parents made. Clearly, generating suspense and answering psychological questions were not Ramsay's intent, but, as a viewer, we can't help but feel profoundly frustrated.

 -- Daniel Reed