Review of We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) by Connie B — 18 Jan 2016

Having a child should bring joy and happiness to every young couple. However the arrival of baby Kevin into the lives of Tilda Swinton and John C. Riley is far from the joyous event that they had been hoping for.

Kevin is a psychologically disturbed and deeply manipulative child. He favours his daddy and deliberately sets out to unnerve and undermined his mother. As he grows, his behaviour becomes more and more extreme leaving his mother exhausted and terrified, especially when she becomes pregnant again and Kevin becomes the brother to a little girl.

Tilda Swinton manages to convey so much in her stillness and silence in this disturbing movie based on the book by Lionel Shriver. Key to the success of the movie are the unnerving performances by the various actors who portray Kevin.

In his younger and older incarnations, he is a thoroughly unlikable and nasty character, bought chillingly to the screen by Rocky Duer, Jasper Newell and Ezra Miller. Quite how director Lynne Ramsey managed to get such deadpan and convincingly evil performances from the younger boys is astonishing.

There is a malevolent dead look in their eyes which is deeply unsettling. This is far from being a comfortable movie. It plays with the concept of whether a child can truly be born evil or what can go wrong in a persons upbringing to foster psychopathic tendencies.

As the action on screen flips between different times with aspect being told in flashback, the viewer gradually builds up a picture of what what has gone on and the horrific and tragic events that form the climax of the movie.