Last night, after taking in a screening of Hiromasa Yonebayashi and Hayao Miyazaki’s The Secret World of Arrietty at the Capitol Theater, I sat across from a friend with whom I volunteer at the theater, enjoying a drink and discussing my plans for this week’s film review: not of the lighthearted, animated Arrietty, but of the other film currently being featured––Lynne Ramsay’s dark thriller, We Need to Talk About Kevin.
“Have you seen it?” I asked, leaning towards my friend, anticipating an answer that I hoped would fuel discussion.
“No,” he replied, “but I don’t think I want to. The regular projectionist posted a note begging for someone to cover his shifts for the rest of the week because he claims he can’t sit through another screening and remain sane. As far as I know, that’s a first for him. So, it must be a pretty rough watch.”
I considered the weight of his response, particularly focused on the term “rough.” Maybe not the descriptive word I would use, but still fitting nonetheless.
“Yeah, you could say that,” I said, taking a sip from my water glass.
And then my friend asked the question that is both most difficult and most important to address: “What about it makes it have that effect?”
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We Need to Talk About Kevin, based on Lionel Shriver’s 2003 novel of the same name, follows Eva Katchadourian (played by the doe-eyed, chameleon of an actress, Tilda Swinton), a well-known travel writer who has fallen from grace since her son, Kevin (played by the all-too convincing, up-and-coming actor Ezra Miller), committed a massacre at his high school two years prior. While Eva tried to contend with the aftermath by rebuilding her life, obtaining a day job as a secretary at a travel agency and visiting Kevin in the juvenile detention center to which he is committed, she dwells on the events––via flashback––that could have contributed to Kevin snapping. Eva and Kevin’s cold, tense relationship, riddled with resentment from the start, leaves the audience asking, “Was it nature or nurture that created this troubled kid?”
I have spent a great deal of my academic career trying to get at affect/effect as it pertains to visual texts, specifically cinema and, even more specifically, the horror film. While We Need to Talk About Kevin does not technically fall under this genre, it does read similarly due to the events, themes, and relationships on which the film centers and how these elements more or less paralyze the audience until the closing credits have finished rolling. Everyone will inevitably take something different away from the film (as everyone does with all films, for viewership on a personal level is ultimately a subjective experience), substantiating their opinions with varying cinematic elements. However, what I believe makes We Need to Talk About Kevin so effectively haunting is how the film’s cinematography and sound design (soundtrack included) contribute to the continuously-rising tension between Eva and Kevin in each flashback and establish post-massacre Eva as a character traumatized beyond repair.
Read separately, the cinematography and sound design are hardly innovative or captivating features (at least in comparison to the powerful performances delivered by Swinton and Miller, with an honorable mention given to John C. Reilly as Franklin, the agreeable husband and father of Eva and Kevin, respectively). However, the way in which the two play off of each other––working together in some scenes while contradicting each other in others––creates an unsettling, oftentimes uncanny, cinematic environment. I found myself shifting uncomfortably in my seat as I watched a close-up shot of Kevin savagely biting into a lychee during a flashback of a formal brunch at home, the squishing and squirting of the fruit perfectly enhancing Kevin’s bitterness and hatred towards his mother as he curtly insists that he does not feel responsible for the loss of his younger sister’s eye. My stomach churned as I witnessed Eva reminisce about the massacre on her way to visit Kevin in prison, with the folksy, perhaps even kitschy, Lonnie Donegan song, “Ham N Eggs” blaring over the silent imagery of high school students begging for their lives and parents screaming and sobbing behind crime scene tape. My visceral reactions to both instances assure me that this artful organization is the primary reason for why scenes from the film still project in my memory when I close my eyes.
I can never seem to directly recommend films like We Need to Talk About Kevin to a general readership, for it truly is a piece of work that one struggles to call “enjoyable” when faced with its narrative content. I do insist, though, that it is a film that can be learned from–– both in terms of its cinematic achievements as well as the impressions of human nature with which it leaves the audience––which, in turn, marks it as important.
Rating: 4.5/5
