We Need To Talk About Kevin

[Boner M]

BhtfXE3tLCE

Wow, Ramsay's back in full image-making force it seems. Anyone read the book? I've heard mixed things.

[Pop Trash]

She sure does like her camera pointing up underwater shots.

[Mal]

This is the great American horror story. heh. Tilda's performance of Eva as the ever persistent-yet-reluctant mother figure is solid. There are a lot of questions that Ramsay raises about parenting- I'll have to let it simmer a bit more, but frankly this is something that will disturb you in the best ways possible.

[Dukefrukem]

Powerful movie. Trying to decide if John C. Reilly is a miscast.

[Ezee E]

Trying to decide if John C. Reilly is a miscast.


He did originally start as a dramatic actor.

I don't really like how unaware of everything he is in this movie though. Almost to a retarded level.

[Dukefrukem]

He did originally start as a dramatic actor.

I don't really like how unaware of everything he is in this movie though. Almost to a retarded level.

Yup. It draws away from the seriousness. I hear him say things like: "you sound like a bumper sticker" and it reminds me of Step Brothers.

[Adam]

Yikes. So superbly disorienting for its first third or so and then the rest is alternately hilarious and jaw-dropping. Reminiscent of prime Polanski more than anything, not just Rosemary's Baby, but Repulsion and his great take on Macbeth, as well. Possible movie moment of the year for me - The Haneke-esque, one-line evisceration Tilda Swinton receives at her office's Christmas party. Can't agree that John C Reilly was miscast because I can't imagine another actor more perfect for all the times he'd ruffle Ezra Miller's hair and mumble something like "boys will be boys" and walk off screen and also romance Swinton in swoony flashbacks and then put on a Steve Brule voice to joke and dance with his moppet of a daughter. And Ezra Miller is the most eminently hateable shit ever, by the way. Don't remember a movie I've cried at so how of all things could the ridiculous mother/son embrace at the end of this one nearly have me fighting back tears? Very weird and very masterful. Definitely need to give Ratcatcher another look, because I fell asleep the last time I tried to watch it but now I'm pretty sure I'd love it

[Kurosawa Fan]

Nope. Technically superb, especially in its use of color, but outside of that it's a mess. It's so infused with melodrama it's impossible to take seriously, yet it isn't humorous enough to be taken as a black comedy. As an allegory about loss of self through childbirth, or the fragility of life, or the tightrope that is parenting, it has nothing of any importance to deliver. Its commentary on violence, especially in youth, is reductive and ignorant. So perhaps I should have taken it as pure visceral horror? That's about the only way it works, but it's too all over the map to be effective there either. It's just a mess tonally, and it's a shame, because Ramsey once again shows how talented she is behind the camera.

[Ezee E]

Nope. Technically superb, especially in its use of color, but outside of that it's a mess. It's so infused with melodrama it's impossible to take seriously, yet it isn't humorous enough to be taken as a black comedy. As an allegory about loss of self through childbirth, or the fragility of life, or the tightrope that is parenting, it has nothing of any importance to deliver. Its commentary on violence, especially in youth, is reductive and ignorant. So perhaps I should have taken it as pure visceral horror? That's about the only way it works, but it's too all over the map to be effective there either. It's just a mess tonally, and it's a shame, because Ramsey once again shows how talented she is behind the camera.
Yussss.

[Dukefrukem]

KF is on one mad tangent.

[Mysterious Dude]

I liked the first half-hour or so of We Need to Talk About Kevin, when it was kind of a modernist assortment of images and memories, but it started to lose me pretty fast when the extended flashbacks began, showing Eva's struggle to raise Kevin as a young child. Kevin is basically Damien from The Omen. It would have been nice if there was some doubt about that. John C. Reilly says something to the extent of, "he's just acting like a child, but you think he has some vendetta against you," but the way he's depicted leaves no doubt that he does have some vendetta against his mother (apparently from birth). What is the point of depicting Kevin as being so purely evil from the start? This doesn't strike me as a sensible way to approach this subject. Regardless of what he's done, Kevin is a person, not a monster, and should have been depicted as such.

[origami_mustache]

I thought it was a black comedy completely which what made everything work so well, but everyone who seems to complain about it took it way to seriously in my opinion.

[Derek]

I thought it was a black comedy completely which what made everything work so well, but everyone who seems to complain about it took it way to seriously in my opinion.

Least funny black comedy ever.

[ledfloyd]

i thought it was pretty clear that everything was exaggerated through the mother's perspective in retrospect.

[elixir]

Yeah, I don't disagree with that, I just don't think that makes it a good film...but it had some funny moments...Christmas kidnapping! I AM THE CONTEXT!!!!

[Spinal]

This is finally opening in Portland on Friday.

[origami_mustache]

I just don't understand how people could take it so serious when most of the situations, characters, juxtaposition of ironic music, the whole archery thing, etc. is all so cartoonish and exaggerated. Personally Tilda Swinton hiding in grocery stores, getting constantly vandalized, and having her dreams destroyed by a Dennis the Menace-esque-problem child only to go from a famous traveling writer to a local travel agent and dealing with her brainless husband was pretty funny to me and entertaining. I found it to be well shot and edited as well.

[Boner M]

It definitely uses broad strokes and moments are very funny, but I think the overall effect is more complicated and chilling.

Anyway, Adrian Martin has finally written a defense (http://cinentransit.com/tenemos-que-hablar-de-kevin/#dos) and it's eloquent as ever. This para hits esp. hard:


Ramsay has always set out to provoke, disturb and disquiet – while at the same time marrying this drive with a very jolly, British sense of exhilaration, even an odd kind of fun. The satirical vein in her work – often directed (as in John Cassavetes) against the world’s army of mediocrities, the dull bureaucrats, public officials and everyday gatekeepers of consensus taste and decency – heightens its truly postmodern feeling and hastens its dismissal in many critical quarters: Ramsay suffers, more than most, the reflex Cahiers du cinéma-line that ‘she just doesn’t love her characters’. Wouldn’t you know it: dreary, finger-wagging Humanism still rules, after all these years!

[Pop Trash]

This is a weird fuckin' movie. I'm not sure what to make of it. The only way it works in a 'realistic' way is if its entirely from the subjective experience of Swinton's mother character. I could see it as a first-person memory of all these experiences, with all of the other characters exaggerated from the emotional perspective of Swinton. Reiley being overly 'aw shucks gee golly,' Kevin being almost comedically evil for no real apparent reason, even the whole 'I'm a math whiz, now I'm shitting my pants, now I'm explaining what fucking is' (ie...how old is this fuckin' kid?) seems to only work as a false memory piece of different years of Kevin's development mashed together in Swinton's mind.

Not sure what the take away of the ending is, even if I saw the death-by-archery thing early on (Chekhov's bow?) or why he went after his sis and dad. It reminds me of Shame a bit in the sense of these highly stylized directors taking on big issues (sex addiction! school shootings!) but ultimately at the end of the film, you walk away with a bit of a shrug.

Also: what is up with Kevin's looks? He looks completely different from Swinton and Reilly and seems to be part Asian. Whaaa?

[baby doll]

I thought it was pretty hilarious ("Mommy used to be happy. Now mommy wakes up everyday wishing she were in France") without diminishing the heroine's suffering. Plus, I liked how the flashback structure creates a sense of mystery about what happened her to her husband and daughter.

[Spinal]

It was a delight to watch this, having completely forgotten who the director was until near the very end. It was nice to appreciate the style without having it pinned down and defined. Then, when it finally came to me, I thought "Oh, of course."

The pattern of Kevin-provocation-followed-by-Mom's-stunned-reaction got a bit tired after a while, but Ramsay's visual command is extraordinary and the emotional journey is palpable. An exhausting film, a difficult film, an imperfect film, but a film of high artistry.

[Pop Trash]

The pattern of Kevin-provocation-followed-by-Mom's-stunned-reaction got a bit tired after a while...

This is like...68.3% of the entire running time.

[Watashi]

I watched this with the recent events in Aurora still clinging in everyone's memories. I expected the viewing to be powerful and visceral, but what I got was an elementary view of parent/child psychosis. I found this film to be terrible.

If this was a 'black comedy', it sure was poorly translated. Everything was so over exaggerated, it became repetitive and nauseating (how many times is Ramsey going to pound her visual red metaphors to the audience). If taken as a straight "realistic" horror into who's to blame for a "bad seed", then it failed on that aspect too. The tone is a mess and silly. The commentary is effective for a Psychology 101 class, but it never digs further than that.

The most infuriating part of the whole movie is the ending:

Throughout the entire film, Eva is getting tortured and taunted by her neighborhood for her son's actions. Some of it is exaggerated, but it's clear that film is trying to analyze how someone would cope with a horrific event such like this and how victims would appropriately react. Yet at the end, when we found out that Kevin not only committed murder at the school, but also killed his father and his sister, it makes NO LOGICAL REASON why the town would turn against her. If anything, the town would sympathize with her (like it tries to show in one small scene with a wounded victim), but if Ramsey is trying to get her message across in some form of reality, it fails hard. The film never explains that the townspeople knew how she was treating her son, so the hostility is unearned. Even in our fucked up world we live in now, I can never see that happening.

[Pop Trash]

Pretty much. Like I said, the only way this movie remotely works for me is if what we're 'watching' is memories filtered through Swinton's mother character's exaggerations or false memories, like an unreliable narrator. But even then I'm not sure how much I like it.

[Ezee E]

Pretty much. Like I said, the only way this movie remotely works for me is if what we're 'watching' is memories filtered through Swinton's mother character's exaggerations or false memories, like an unreliable narrator. But even then I'm not sure how much I like it.
There's not really an implication that it could be faded/exaggerated memories though. I like the idea, but just doesn't work.

[Boner M]

There's not really an implication that it could be faded/exaggerated memories though.
Err... what? The whole film's a waking reverie-nightmare that she's having as she's on her way to meet Kevin in prison.

[Beau]

It's pretty clear to me this film works through a subjective, unreliable narrator. I don't personally like how Kevin is portrayed, since, even viewed through the distorting lens of Tilda's memory, he never struck me as particularly foreboding. Obviously, what he does, or what the script makes him do, is awful and terrible. But Ezra Miller, who plays Kevin, never channels the horrifying depths of his character. He's self-consciously playing a "bad boy," going through the motions. If he's supposed to be the devil that Tilda remembers, I would expect someone more immediately unnerving.

Everything else about the film I enjoyed greatly. It's a heightened, schizoid view into the mind of a woman bent on punishing herself, as she builds a masochistic self-image of herself as a woman hated by everyone, especially her own son, whom she never understands. The ridiculously, even cartoonishly, evil nature of Kevin underscores this distance between mother and son. She cannot approach an understanding of his actions. He is forever a mystery, an answered question mark, who has devolved into a cardboard monster in the fragments of her shattered recollections. She can only look back at Kevin as the repository of her own failure as a human being, which is why she always needs to get away, go off on trips around the world, trips which, curiously, she spends very little time recalling, as if her obsession with Kevin - this Kevin that is a symbol for her own mediocrity, even her own monstrosity, the monster that she, in a way, thinks she is herself, materialized in the deadly shape of her son - as if her obsession with Kevin had eaten up all other memories, even happy ones, and the only one of her overseas adventures which still survives in her mind is that wild, red sea of tomatoes, a point of transcendence that, in the blood-red bath of the tomatoes, finds its way back to Kevin.

[Pop Trash]

I was thinking about The Good Son (killer Mac Culkin movie) in relation to this, since in a Kael-esque way I prefer good trash to so-so art, and it seems Ian McEwan wrote the screenplay to that. Interesting.

[Watashi]

It's pretty clear to me this film works through a subjective, unreliable narrator. I don't personally like how Kevin is portrayed, since, even viewed through the distorting lens of Tilda's memory, he never struck me as particularly foreboding. Obviously, what he does, or what the script makes him do, is awful and terrible. But Ezra Miller, who plays Kevin, never channels the horrifying depths of his character. He's self-consciously playing a "bad boy," going through the motions. If he's supposed to be the devil that Tilda remembers, I would expect someone more immediately unnerving.

I dunno, dude. I don't know what "bad boys" you know, but the film made sure Kevin was the embodiment of pure evil from the very first frame. All that was missing was The Exorcist theme playing every time he came onscreen. What could he have done that would have been more "unnerving"? I get the exaggeration and cartoony villainy is a result of being filtered through Eva's nightmarish memories, but it's executed poorly. The film has Kevin playing violent video games, killing animals, having no friends, sexually frustrated, and other signs that he's up to no good.


Everything else about the film I enjoyed greatly. It's a heightened, schizoid view into the mind of a woman bent on punishing herself, as she builds a masochistic self-image of herself as a woman hated by everyone, especially her own son, whom she never understands. The ridiculously, even cartoonishly, evil nature of Kevin underscores this distance between mother and son. She cannot approach an understanding of his actions. He is forever a mystery, an answered question mark, who has devolved into a cardboard monster in the fragments of her shattered recollections. She can only look back at Kevin as the repository of her own failure as a human being, which is why she always needs to get away, go off on trips around the world, trips which, curiously, she spends very little time recalling, as if her obsession with Kevin - this Kevin that is a symbol for her own mediocrity, even her own monstrosity, the monster that she, in a way, thinks she is herself, materialized in the deadly shape of her son - as if her obsession with Kevin had eaten up all other memories, even happy ones, and the only one of her overseas adventures which still survives in her mind is that wild, red sea of tomatoes, a point of transcendence that, in the blood-red bath of the tomatoes, finds its way back to Kevin.

Her fragmented memory and frustrated obsession with Kevin is clearly explained, but even in the present times (when there is no unreliable narrator), the extreme-hostility that this woman receives is beyond cartoonish (and like I explained above, completely unwarranted when the film reveals the twist about her husband and daughter). That bothered me to the point where I couldn't focus or care about her relationship (or what is left of it) with Kevin.

Edit: The cinematography and Swinton's performance was nice (though I thought she was better in Julia).

[Beau]

I dunno, dude. I don't know what "bad boys" you know, but the film made sure Kevin was the embodiment of pure evil from the very first frame. All that was missing was The Exorcist theme playing every time he came onscreen. What could he have done that would have been more "unnerving"? I get the exaggeration and cartoony villainy is a result of being filtered through Eva's nightmarish memories, but it's executed poorly. The film has Kevin playing violent video games, killing animals, having no friends, sexually frustrated, and other signs that he's up to no good.

My problem is with the acting. I get that the movie makes him do bad things, but Ezra doesn't communicate his evil. He's not unnerving. I don't see it in his stare. I don't feel it. It's subjective, sure, but there you go. Casting is important.


Her fragmented memory and frustrated obsession with Kevin is clearly explained, but even in the present times (when there is no unreliable narrator), the extreme-hostility that this woman receives is beyond cartoonish (and like I explained above, completely unwarranted when the film reveals the twist about her husband and daughter). That bothered me to the point where I couldn't focus or care about her relationship (or what is left of it) with Kevin.

Sure, but then we'd have to establish that the present scenes are no longer linked to her own subjective view of the world, and I don't think the film's aesthetic clearly demarcates past and present in this way. That is, I don't think we leave her "mindscape" simply because we're in the present. Bertolucci's The Conformist is similar. Whether past or present, memory or current reality, Marcello's subjectivity predominates. In this case, I think the "extreme-hostility" reflects Swinton's emotions and guilt, rather than some documentarian portrayal of how she's actually or "objectively" treated by society.

[Yxklyx]

I never got a sense of evil from Kevin though I can see how others can interpret it that way. He was just a classic Sociopath and I sensed that he got that from his mother which is why they had any connection at all. The key scene was the birthing scene when the nurse utters something like "stop resisting". I've never heard anyone say anything like that in a birthing scene before. Tilda never wanted Kevin to be born and Kevin sensed that. It was the seed that grew into what he became.

[megladon8]

This was terrible, and very dumb. One of the worst films I've seen all year.

[Grouchy]

This was terrible, and very dumb. One of the worst films I've seen all year.
Are you serious? It's one of the best I've seen.

[megladon8]

Are you serious? It's one of the best I've seen.


100% serious. I found some of it pretty embarassing.

[Grouchy]

100% serious. I found some of it pretty embarassing.
Okay then.