The person in this film trying to cope with a recent Earth-shattering tragedy is Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton) and the specific set of circumstances that have completely altered her entire world doesn't involve her, but rather her son, Kevin (Ezra Miller), who committed a massacre at his High School leaving an unknown amount of students dead and another unknown amount of students severely injured. Rare is the day that Eva is able to walk around town on basic errands without meeting someone who will berate her for what her son has wrought. Kevin might be incarcerated now, but his presence still looms over her life to such a degree that it seems to inform how every single person interacts with her.
As she tries to navigate the present, Eva cannot get the past out of her head. Memories of her experiences with her son over the years constantly race through her head and the viewer gets to gaze into this psychological turmoil in the way the script by Lynne Ramsey and Rory Stewart Kinnear depicts the assorted flashback sequences in this film. Scenes set in the past are frequently arranged in a non-linear fashion with abrupt beginnings and ends that replicate how these memories flicker through Eva's brains. This brilliantly executed way of organizing the feature ensures that the viewer is transported directly into the fractured psyche of Eva Khatchadourian in an incredibly harrowing manner.
It is through these flashback scenes that make up a large share of We Need To Talk About Kevin that we get to see what kind of person Kevin was prior to him committing a massacre. Interestingly, throughout these flashback sequences, Ramsey and Kinnear paint Kevin not as a troubled tragic youth, but rather someone who was malicious from the get-go. This was a kid who had cruelty coursing through his veins the moment he was born and much of that cruelty is inflicted on Eva over the years. As he grows up, Kevin's behaviors worsen and he makes it clear he's not doing any of this for an agenda of any kind. He simply wants to spread malice unto the world and especially his mother while reveling in the pointlessness of it all. Kevin is wickedness incarnate and Ezra Miller's excellently realized disturbing performance makes this character constantly haunting to watch.
Miller, of course, is not the only person delivering a sublime performance in We Need To Talk About Kevin, though. Actually, the best performance in the entire film can be found in Tilda Swinton's mesmerizing work as Eva Khatchadourian. Tilda Swinton has become famous in the present-day pop culture landscape for playing heightened characters, but We Need To Talk To Kevin is a reminder that she's also more than capable of playing recognizably normal human beings, one whose pain she can convey with remarkable skill. For the role of Eva Khatchadourian, she gets to do just that while also engaging in the daunting task of portraying a single human being in numerous different stages of their life.
In the portions of the story set in the past, Swinton is excellent in depicting the changes Eva goes through over the years. As Kevin's sense of maliciousness escalates as he gets older, Swinton does a wonderful job conveying how conflicted Eva is; does she try to connect with a human being incapable of connecting with others or does she abandon him outright? Meanwhile, in the scenes set in the present, Swinton is simply devastating in how she depicts Eva being a shell of her former self. The life is drained from her face, she rarely speaks above a hushed tone, every moment she seems to be masking some sort of personal agony that she's found impossible to shake. Just the scene of her trying to do some grocery shopping while avoiding the mother of a student Kevin killed alone is enough to make this performance an incredible accomplishment for Tilda Swinton as an actor.
We Need To Talk About Kevin hinges itself heavily on Tilda Swinton as Eva Khatchadourian, but those aren't the only elements here that make this gripping feature so excellent. Lynne Ramsay's direction is especially key to why We Need To Talk About Kevin works as well as it does, juggling so many different timeframes is a daunting task she pulls off with ease while the atmosphere of the film is one of bleak intensity that's impressively evocative. That atmosphere helps the audience so clearly see what kind of living hell Eva is going through in her day-to-day life, even something like an office Christmas party is just another chance for people to remind her how broken she is in the wake of the atrocities her son has committed.
The events of the past have trapped present-day Eva and that sensation is closely replicated for the viewer in a petrifyingly effective way. Lynne Ramsay's direction, as well as the editing by Joe Bini that ensures that the cutting between various points in time are well-handled, make the perspective of Eva an enthralling one that you can't turn away from. It's intentionally rarely easy to watch but We Need To Talk About Kevin is an engrossing achievement in so many ways and like the feelings one goes through after experiencing a great tragedy, this motion picture will be sticking around in my mind for ages to come.
Sidenote: The fact that We Need To Talk About Kevin frequently subtly posits that destructive male behavior, especially behavior that adversely affects women specifically, typically gets dismissed simply as "Boys Being Boys", makes a moment where Kevin's dad Franklin (John C. Reilly) refers to Kevin as "Just like Donald Trump" (in response to Kevin's place to sell an object he got in the mail to his fellow students) especially prescient, though Lord knows Donald Trump was engaging in awful behavior well before the 2011 release of We Need To Talk About Kevin, let alone before he ran for President.
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