We Need to Talk About Kevin

The director of Morvern Callar. The mother of a teenage boy who went on a high-school killing spree tries to deal with her grief -- and feelings of responsibility for her child's actions -- by writing to her estranged husband.
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Based on the best-selling novel, Tilda Swinton gives a strong performance as a mother who always knew her son was different, angry and perhaps evil.

Programmer's Note
After a nine-year absence from the screen, acclaimed Scottish director Lynne Ramsay returns to the Festival with We Need to Talk About Kevin, an intimate and disturbing look at a mother confronting very dark truths about her teenage son. Based on Lionel Shriver’s Orange Prize-winning bestseller of the same name, the film stars Tilda Swinton in a heartbreaking performance as Eva, a once-vibrant woman who finds herself re­examining her life and role as a mother, and her possible complicity in the fact that Kevin has always been evil.

Ramsay doesn’t make much capital of the ultimate outcome of Kevin’s natural contempt for everything and everyone around him. Instead she creates a domestic horror film that cleverly strikes notes from the demon-child subgenre. Eva reflects on various disquieting interactions with her son over the years, culminating with her memories of the adolescent Kevin (Ezra Miller), a passive-aggressive kind of socio­path whose hard edge is backed with a grim sense of humour. A reluctant and anxious mother who found herself unhappy in her traditional family role, Eva now starts to question whether her resentment of Kevin and her husband (John C. Reilly) could have ruined her son in early childhood or beyond.

Ramsay forms a disjointed collage of recollections, all viewed through the lens of a lost and puzzled woman. Scenes from Kevin’s upbringing, the distant past of Eva’s career and her gradual post-partem emotional crises jut up against each other.

Enhanced by a brilliantly subtle score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood (who also composed the music for There Will Be Blood), Ramsay’s film blurs the relationship between time, cause and effect to pose nature-versus­-nurture questions about predisposition, maternal instinct, guilt and conditional love. The answers are far from clear-cut, so be prepared for a post-credits debate among friends.