Film review: We Need To Talk About Kevin (15)

LYNNE Ramsay’s third feature after Ratcatcher (1999) and Morvern Callar (2002) has been a long time brewing, but for reasons of budget and necessity was shot in a scant month. The result will haunt you for years. In adapting Lionel Shriver’s Orange Prize-winning novel, Ramsay ditches the original’s series of letters written by Eva (Tilda Swinton) to her husband in the aftermath of an unspeakably awful act by their son, Kevin. Instead, we are tested with a series of fractured memories that shift back and forth in time that are initially disorientating but gather coherence – you can place the timeframes by the length of Eva’s hair – and always with the pervasive sense that Eva has blood on her hands.

Indeed the film opens with a mass of bodies soaked in red, and Eva drowning among them. It’s a dream but it establishes gore as the dominant shade in her palette. Someone vandalises her house with red paint, and she scrubs at it vainly, unable to get the stain off her home, or herself. It’s the colour of hell too, so when a couple of Mormons try to engage her in a debate on the afterlife she cuts it short by telling them she already has a reservation booked: “I’m going straight to hell. Eternal damnation… the whole thing.”

Swinton is well cast as an ambivalent lead. Eva is frustrated, vital and guilt-ridden, depending on the time period – but always dominated by Kevin, her first-born child. From birth he is ominous and angry, crying constantly and at such a volume that she takes him out to some Manhatten roadworks to drown out the noise. By the time he’s portrayed by Jasper Newell he’s an eerie blank-faced Damien from The Omen, then Ezra Miller offers a more complex teen – demonic when alone with Eva, but ordinary to Eva’s husband (John C Reilly) and the family’s daughter Celia (Ashley Gerasimovich).

Along the way, Ramsay plants the seeds of Kevin’s eventual appalling act, both physical and psychological. She uses odd folksy vintage standards on the soundtrack to heighten the sense that all is not well in this part of American suburbia, and a lychee becomes a substitute for one of Kevin’s early awful deeds.

The film is at its best when nearly wordless; imagery rather than dialogue is the strong suit in the script, by Ramsay and her husband Rory Kinnear. Nor does the film offer an answer to the question that leaps to mind after the family pet guinea pig dies gruesomely, one character winds up with an eyepatch, or Eva interrupts Kevin during some alone-time and elicits an unexpected response – namely, why don’t they cart him off to a therapist? But maybe the book doesn’t explain that either.

It’s a pity We Need To Talk About Kevin wasn’t part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival because it would have been the standout UK premiere ths year. It’s been said that negotiations broke down after the festival expressed the hope that the film wasn’t too depressing. Kevin is bleak, but Ramsay exercises restraint too. She could have pumped up the horror with stretched out depictions showing Kevin at his worst. Instead she drives in the nail with a single blow – a sardonic look, a contemplative close-up, a silence that allows us to draw our own conclusions. The result is an intense, provocative film which rattles around your subconscious for days. v

On general release from Friday

n LYNNE RAMSAY PROFILE: MAIN SECTION, PAGE 17