Is a mother’s love for her child automatic? Is it a built-in component like the very heart that is meant to possess it? Or is it volatile, subject to breaking or never fully forming from the start and what’s more, must this question of maternal love always be cloaked about the mother or can the child, that birthed being, be the cause of its mother’s burning, emotional uncertainties? We Need to Talk About Kevin heartily addresses these and other inquiries into this particular relationship. It ferociously explores how much of a reflection a child really is of its mother and snakes its way into the lowest depths of maternal resentment and despair.
The film’s premise is outwardly, basic. It begins with Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton) living in a dilapidated house and clearly, detested by her neighbors. The origins of Eva’s public shame are gradually revealed through flashbacks, slowly peeling back the layers of obscurity. But, the cruxes of We Need to Talk About Kevin are the intense emotions of its characters or lack thereof, as these are the true sources of the chaos.
We Need to Talk About Kevin’s story is shrouded in mystery and plays out like a surging nightmare intertwined with an equally painful reality. It implies the still controversial notion: Not every child is a blessing and moreover, not every child is born innocent. Some people are simply born bad and sometimes there is nothing its mother nor anyone else can do to change that ugly fact.
As the ostracized mother, Eva, Swinton is fully natural and potent. She excels at communicating a great deal with little dialogue. Her eyes and bodily expressions declare the character’s frazzled state, as a woman who strains herself to be a mother, while married to Franklin (John C. Reilly), a husband who is clueless about her mounting frustrations with Kevin (Ezra Miller). Eva’s turmoil blankets the story and though its disturbing themes are rare and simultaneously, cheerless, director Lynne Ramsay guides the plot with such delicacy and firmness that we are left with a relentless, tragic story wrapped in a kind of surreal, gorgeous, cinematic red velvet.
This bizarre beauty is spawned from Kevin’s abrasiveness with its ideas. Kevin takes a bold, yet ambiguous stance on its thick subjects. While it overtly shows Eva reactive and very much bothered by her son and his disturbing behavior, the character never explicitly expresses any hatred or blatant disgust with her child, though she comes close. The audience is largely left to deduce their own conclusions about the internalities of our female protagonist.
To add to the film’s handsome murkiness, Kevin’s psychology is never examined. There are no scenes with a therapist or attempts by Eva, herself, to learn more about the inner-workings of her son. Kevin has no clear system of structure for his actions and their later consequences; such consequences are irrelevant to him and only met with stoicism and indifference. By the film’s conclusion, it is evident that Kevin, himself, has no awareness of any impetuses for what he does or has done. He is as lost about his own darkness as his mother or at least, that is what the character, seemingly, claims.
We Need to Talk About Kevin is harsh and honest, filled to its brim with thought. It presents an acute reality, filled with an intensely disjointed family and teen violence, a reality not unlike our own. Ramsay sways the film, back and forth, from Eva’s dreadful past to her troublesome, vulnerable present and the many collisions of the two, with ease and profundity. We Need to Talk About Kevin unflinchingly attacks its hefty themes. It is aggressive; sometimes it is uncomfortable to watch and it leaves little room for concrete explanation. Therein lies the bulk of its splendor.
