Movies

For much of We Need to Talk About Kevin, you don't know why the life of Eva (Tilda Swinton) is so desperately sad. All you know is that scenes that should be ordinary or even joyous do not match up to those feelings: Spain's famous Tomatina festival of tomato squashing looks violent, an afternoon scraping layers of paint off the porch looks perilous, and being rushed by pre-school-aged ballerinas looks lonely.

That's the way this film is put together. It's a series of relentlessly intense vignettes that paint a detailed picture of a life you're glad you don't have to live when you leave the cinema.

You slowly piece together why: Eva is a woman just surviving after a school massacre perpetrated by her son, Kevin (newcomer Ezra Miller). The film, based on the bestselling novel by Lionel Shriver, follows Eva as she attempts to rebuild her life while also reflecting on Kevin's upbringing. The relationship between mother and son is an 18-year fight for dominance, but her husband, Franklin (John C. Reilly), does not see the kid's cruel and manipulative side.

The movie poses an open-ended chicken-and-egg question: Was Eva unable to bond with baby Kevin because he was innately sociopathic? Or did Kevin become a sociopath because Eva was unable to love him?

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a remarkable film because it talks about taboos — that we might not love our own children, that there are more victims in murder than just those who died — and it does it in a powerful, incisive and mesmerising way. Its imagery is deeply beautiful, even when it's a bit ugly.

Swinton and Riley make one of Hollywood's weirdest on-screen couplings, but their performances are unassailable. The Kevins, too (as well as teenage Miller, there's under-10 Jasper Newell and toddler Rocky Duer), are impressive, turning on enough convincingly menacing glares to rattle you to the core.