'We Need to Talk About Kevin' explores tense history behind mother-son relationship, violence

We Need to Talk About Kevin
Directed by Lynne Ramsay
BBC Films

The opening shot of “We Need to Talk About Kevin” shows a sterile, gauzy curtain billowing in the night breeze against the increasing, disconcerting rattling of sprinklers. Then it switches to the bird’s eye view of a deliciously unsettling tomato fest, where scantily clad men and women are able to squeeze past each other seemingly only because of the lubrication provided by tomato juice and remnants.

Then emerges the central character Eva, played by Oscar winner Tilda Swinton, seemingly above everyone else, being worshipped like some tomato-drenched, pagan goddess. Then all of a sudden, the goddess is abandoned, left thrashing on her own in a gory sea of slaughtered tomatoes.

The image of humility, of a woman falling from grace and of slaughter are all references to the central plot line in which Swinton’s character, Eva, has to suffer from both guilt and blame after her teenage son Kevin (Ezra Miller), massacred several classmates. However, the truly delectable drama occurs not in this horrendous act but in the artfully fragmented flashbacks of what could possibly have lead to a teenage boy having such violent tendencies.

But the artfulness of “We Need to Talk About Kevin” is not pretentious. The ambience of the film is created through clear juxtaposition of red and white elements that symbolizes Eva’s ambivalence toward her son. At times, their relationship is tense with a sense of imminent doom, and at others, it is wordless and sedate.

“We Need to Talk About Kevin” has a noir edge that does not require the showiness of films such as “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” The scene in which Eva, harrowed by baby Kevin’s incessant crying, stands next to a construction worker with a jackhammer to drown out the demanding cries of her baby, is humorously macabre.

Ezra Miller’s Kevin is not another version of the angsty, pot-smoking troubled teenager. Instead, Miller, as one of Nylon Magazine’s 55 future faces, dons an adolescent who wears undersized cartoon T-shirts and whose room is squeaky neat. However, with his misanthropic and devilish gaze, it is obvious this appearance of innocence and discipline belies a far more dangerous personality.

The mother-son power-play that is central to the film’s theme is captured with both subtlety and precision by Swinton and Miller. This amounts to an effect of volatility so palpable that when the resolution of the film occurs, the revelation manages to be both unsurprising and devastating.