We Need to Talk About Kevin's Problems as a Film

British director Lynne Ramsay has had a relatively easy ride from the critics for We Need to Talk About Kevin. Based on an epistolary novel by Lionel Shriver, the film stars Tilda Swinton as an American mother trying to raise a hateful and evil child with her husband (John C. Reilly), who gets favoured treatment from the boy and therefore displays a more upbeat attitude to his behavioural issues.

Apart from Swinton, whose presence invariably lifts any film (see Erick Zonka's Julia for a mess she makes kind of interesting) I found the film immensely disappointing. I liked her first two films a great deal - Ratcatcher was extraordinary, and Morvern Callar only marginally less impressive. The new film's chief problem is that it's about the workings of fate, and therefore gives the audience nothing to do other than watch a series of preordained events spin to their ugly conclusion. 

We Need to Talk has no role for its protagonist to play other than a passive one. Swinton walks around in a daze for the entire film, loving her unlovable son because, as a mother, she has been biologically programmed. 

Kevin is not so much a character as an evil stick figure from a horror movie but without the supporting genre thrills to compensate. (Compare Ezra Miller as the teenage Kevin to Daniel Henshall's terrifyingly believable performance as John Bunting, the sadistic leader of a gang of South Australian serial killers, in Justin Kurzel's Snowtown and you instantly see the depth of the problem.)


Kevin is fated to commit terrible acts. His mother is fated to be unable to stop him yet to continue loving him nonetheless. Dramatically, that's flat. Ramsay's attempts at jazzing it all up with dream sequences, montage sequences, and endless impressionistic passages are there to distract the audience. Intriguing at first, quickly they outstay their welcome.

Some commentators have pointed to an apparent suggestion in the novel that Swinton is an unreliable narrator, and that the story being spun is therefore not to be taken at face value. Any attempt at achieving a similar effect in the film is, sadly, lost.


One thing I will credit Ramsay for, though, is her choosing three actors to play Kevin at different ages that actually look like they're the same person - as assured an example of casting as Jane Campion's three choices to play author Janet Frame in An Angel at my Table.