Review of We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) by Cameron B — 03 Dec 2012

This movie should have been titled "How to Raise a Sociopath", it's a great step-by-step of what not to do when raising a kid. I thought this movie would be about a family who is trying to deal with the fallout after their child has committed some heinous crime (as the title would indicate), which I thought was interesting subject matter.

However, it's actually a series of flashbacks about this kid's childhood (the titular Kevin) intertwined with his mother's current mess of a life (after the crime was committed). The acting is superb (both by Tilda Swinton and the kids that played Kevin at various ages - how they found such eerie kids is amazing), but to me the narrative was a little dry.

It's effective in building the suspense of what Kevin has actually done, but that's really the only compelling part about it. It seems like the flashback structure is supposed to slowly reveal that his problems have roots in how he was raised, but there is no subtlety in how it's done and you know from the very first scene that the problem started with the parenting.

To get the audience on board with the parents, it should have shown how the problems crept up on them. Instead, it's so obvious that Kevin is a bad seed from the start, and the parents do absolutely NOTHING to try to prevent any of his behavior, so you don't sympathize with them at all.

Even so, the way that everyone in the movie reacts to Tilda's character was completely over-the-top, everyone treats her as if she had committed the crime and in real life, that just wouldn't happen (people may shun her but wouldn't overtly abuse her).

And worse, NOBODY TALKS ABOUT KEVIN, which was really frustrating for me. I guess that's the point, but it wasn't the movie that I wanted to see. So this one was kind of a let-down for me.