He proves it when he poops himself twice in a row and she breaks his arm in a fit of rage, what he calls, "The most honest thing you ever did to me." And so is Eva. Did they create a monster, or was he born that way? She is the wrong person in the wrong life with the wrong child. Some interpreted scene at the gym as her being repulsed by pregnant bodies, but I am thinking she was like "why can't I be happy and bubbly with this child like they are?" 112 minutes An excellent movie with great characters, amazing development, and astounding use of cuts, foreshadowing, and visual storytelling. We see it perfectly after he blinds Celia - Eva attempts to confront him about what he's done, and he sits chewing a water chestnut to impress the image of plucking out an eye on Eva, just to watch the horror on her face. Franklin's story is simpler but in some ways I think it's worse. Ramsay regularly cuts to a scene where Eva is driving her car past flashing police lights toward the scene of some tragedy. Kevin's insidious nature is best exemplified in a scene staged in the aftermath of Celia losing her eye. She has something of an answer as to why Kevin committed such terrors, but where does that leave her? But it also doesn't set out to wag a moral finger or make any grand, sweeping statements. Franklin, on the other hand, does not give him a path to honest interactions. Most of the film in present time shows the ritual abuse and humiliation the bereft Eva suffers from the community that she continues to live in after Kevin's deeds. I watched this film several years ago and decided today I'd watch it again as I really enjoyed it the first time round! To rate, slide your finger across the stars from left to right. So, I think it'd be really, really cool to see if they came up with something else. Instead, it's a personal story about a family or more specifically, a mother (an excellent Swinton) and her troubled son. Like Jentorra kind of was the reason that her society collapsed in a way, in the comic books. Franklin does not and cannot understand Kevin, and completely resists any opportunity to do so. When Eva gets pregnant for the second time, Kevin feels that he has become estranged from the family and grows jealous. A suspenseful and gripping psychological thriller, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN explores the relationship between a mother and her evil son. This is the scene where the film begins and the ending comes full circle revisiting the moment of rupture in Evas life. Directed by Lynne Ramsay, "We Need to Talk About Kevin" is fragments of time, jagged and confusing, lurching around inside her mind. Despite his crime, she sells the house to pay the legal fees, moves closer to the prison so she can visit him, and continues to support him. The film depicts him as a psychopath beyond redemption. While Eva is shown throughout the film to be indifferent toward her son, Kevin's actions are fueled by his desire to spite her. Though Ramsay does away with Eva as a first-person narrator in the film, she still retains Eva's point-of-view throughout. In Morvern Callar, Samantha Morton grieved her boyfriend's suicide. It is a world where any attempts to offer a message of mercy, conversion and redemption must be done deftly and authentically, because at the end of the day, sometimes the community wont rally around you and more often than not Mr. Potter carries the day. The film moves without any pattern between past, present and who knows when. Fr. The moments of Grace are, as they should be, not in moments like the dinner scene but in the unexpected. Kevin has numerous reasons to hate his mother, Eva. edition that "We Need to Talk About Kevin" asks an explicit question, "Yet I hope that this question is no more resolved in the book than crude oppositions like 'nature vs. nurture' are ever reconciled in real life.". So, I'm personally glad that they distanced that part of the thing from this character, but there was so little overlap that - There's only seven comic books, I think, that have Jentorra in them - that we really did seem to have a lot more freedom to kind of create a fully new character for this. But Ramsay is less interested in the blame game, more in how trauma can put us in a vicious cycle of self-inflicted pain. By contrast with Elephant's oddly diffident lyricism, We Need To Talk About Kevin's expressionistic naturalism has a roiling, post-traumatic nonlinearity. But Kevin is just getting started, and his final act will be beyond anything anyone imagined. Now, mommy wakes up every morning and wishes she was in France! About 5 uses of "fuck" (once used sexually by a 7-year-old child), one use of "cunt". Ultimately what it winds up giving us is perhaps the most important truth of Christianity, namely that God is the hope to be found in the midst of the smoke and ashes. Sometimes Zuzu's petals are all you have to hold onto. Written by Julia Wolf. Franklin didn't do that - he wasn't even there. Jake Martin, visit our special Oscars season blog, Movie Minister.. Kevin knows that Celia is his mothers favorite offspring, and he goes to great lengths to make his mother feel uncomfortable. So, I think TV being as fast paced as it is, and as kind of chaotic as it can be, it doesn't always set you up for being able to walk into a film where you've had plenty of time to look into everything and prepare. American release: January 27, 2012. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) photos, including production stills, premiere photos and other event photos, publicity photos, behind-the-scenes, and more. Indeed, Kevin is a relentless film that gives its audience few opportunities to come up for air from the depths of anguish to which it plummets. Prefer Ramsay's earlier pictures to this flawed but interesting piece. When she asks him that honest question, having accepted the reality of her abuse towards him, she comes to him totally honest And he no longer feels that underlying connection between love and fear that motivated him to his actions. If you look one level deeper it's clear that Kevin was deeply and horribly emotionally abused by both of his parents, and in a genuinely loving family he would not have turned out the way he did. So what about Franklin? In We Need to Talk about Kevin, Eva is literally on trial for parental negligence. Kevin was never the apple of his mothers eye, which he realized from early childhood. She obviously feels complicit and takes on the role of communal scapegoat as a way to expiate her own guilt as well as to grieve the loss of her family. This turns out to be some sort of annual Italian tomato festival, but the image is disturbing. So, that part I kind of liked because it shows, okay, this is what someone who's still fighting, interacting with someone who kind of essentially gave in. She mentions that she believes he'll be released in five years. February 24, 2023 at 12:05 PM ET. Is it possible for her to move on from something so traumatic? Keep your comments focused on the film. We Need to Talk About Kevin. Is she channeling the brief moment of affection between the two when he was young and sick, or is she working toward being a better mother upon his release? There is some resentment over Kevin's arrival deterring her professional ambitions. Eva rushes to the school to see Kevin getting arrested. Each rewatch only feels more rewarding because Ramsay is so pure and gifted a filmmaker she rattles and revises our preconceptions of what a movie and yes, mother too can be. Rated the #74 best film of 2011, and #5264 in the greatest all-time movies (according to RYM users). For instance, the ball game Eva plays with a toddler Kevin: when Kevin successfully rolls the ball back to her, her praise is strained and brittle. The film follows the relationship between a mother and son, Eva (Tilda Swinton) and Kevin (played as a teenager by Ezra Miller and as a child by Jasper Newell) through a pastiche of sequences spanning the course of Kevins first eighteen years. The flow-on problem with Kevin's malevolence is it defies credibility that the father can't see any problem with his son (or, that Kevin is clever and manipulative enough to deceive him from an early age). It's no secret that We Need to Talk about Kevin is intended to challenge your assumptions about the people we think of as "evil." Business, Economics, and Finance. He is pursuing a Licentiate in Sacred Theology at Heythrop College in London. The mistake would be to take the film apart and try to reconnect the pieces in chronological order. He seems to recognize that he has some advantage over her. She isn't even really at the center of it; that position is occupied by her son, Kevin, who is an instinctive sadist with a gift for knowing exactly how to wound her, reject her, deceive her and make her soul bleed. The film does not show us how Kevin presents the eyeball to Eva in jail. Eva Khatchadourian, a former travelogue writer, lives in a rundown shack in an American suburb and goes to meet her son. Kevin gets taught about sex from his mother but he already knows what it is and calls it "fucking". Fast forward to fifteen year old Kevin, and we can see that this habit has become his worldview. That the film works so brilliantly is a tribute in large part to the actors. In a sonic sleight-of-hand, the joyful cheers alchemise into the sorrowful cries of the families and friends of Kevin's victims. Those trucks have the new UPS logo, where if the time-frame is correct, the trucks would have had the old logo of a stringed parcel above the UPS Shield. Outward appearances of mother and son match their steely interiority as neither suffers fools gladly and both abhor artifice and sentimentality. Overview. "At the end of the day, I have no idea, and that pure, serene, ignorance has become, itself, a funny kind of solace," she writes in a letter to her deceased husband. So, you kind of draw from that, but then, you also think about just putting yourself in that position too. describes the "nature vs. nurture" debate. The real monster is expecting nothing less than unconditional love. The wife and mother, Eva (Tilda Swinton), has been so overwhelmed by despair that her life exists in her mind all at the same time. We Need to Talk About Kevin is already playing in NYC; it opens today in LA, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix and is rolling out nationwide. Firstpost - All Rights Reserved. Finally. The point here is not to understand Kevin at all. GameStop Moderna Pfizer Johnson & Johnson AstraZeneca Walgreens Best Buy Novavax SpaceX Tesla. You know, it's all fun and games until you really understand that every single decision that you make impacts everybody. Psychology Today describes the "nature vs. nurture" debate as questioning how both elements impact a person's characteristics. It is so ingrained in our culture even a fellow grieving mother slaps her in the parking lot. His willful misbehaviors continue as his mother becomes more estranged from him. As she leaves, a troupe of tiny ballerinas in tutus run past her. Use the boards for extended discussion. Rather, Ramsay's film is an extended treatment of the optics of grief and guilt. While Eva and Franklin argue over the accident, Kevin taunts his mother by peeling a litchi, with a smug look on his face. We see it in the wall of canned tomatoes that play backdrop to Evas anxiety attack in a supermarket, and the Cabernets she drowns her sorrows with. Was he acting out to punish Eva? Of course, that mental illness is presumed by viewers. Eva often looks like she's in a state of shock. She is less interested in the nature vs nurture debate, more in the crippling weight of societal expectations of motherhood. A bright light appears outside. An early scene shows Eva apparently participating in an orgy in a lake of blood. From here he becomes a sociopathic teen with a rather keen interest in archery. An unshakeable experience and a daring experiment in film form, Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin challenged conventional wisdom on what makes for a good adaptation. It'd be so much fun. Because children are normally associated with innocence, creepy children are a tried concept in horror films. ; Black Lightning) played this powerful new character, who has been engaged in this ongoing struggleagainst Kang (Jonathan Majors) for far longer than most and has paid an incomparableprice while trying to liberate her people from his rule. When Eva dips her whole face in a basin of water, her face turns into Kevin's. Unfortunately, Eva either doesnt know or refuses to know what a more meaningful relationship with her son would look like; thus when their dinner begins with her asking him how school is going, Kevin immediately shuts her down, offering up a clichd mother/son dialogue full of rote questions and deadened responses. Based on Lionel Shriver's 2003 bestseller of the same name, Lynne Ramsay's 2011 film explores a broken family, mental illness, and the aftermath of a tragedy. The victims of those who go out with a bang are miniscule in comparison to the number who go out (extinguish themselves) in solitude with nary a whimper. The name itself Eva is not chosen by chance, echoing the fatally disobedient woman of the Bible, whose act determined the loss of the Garden of Eden. Then she goes home. With Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, Ezra Miller, Jasper Newell. Her only crime was perhaps hurrying into the role before she was ready. Something just happened. Updated Date: Like a fluke, nothing to do with her personality or her hubby's personality? Watch Indie Spirit Stars Suggest Indie Gems You Must Watch Right Now. By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform. for disturbing violence and behavior, some sexuality and language, Berlinale 2023 Highlights, Part Two: Reality, Manodrome, The Adults, Inside, Golda, Angela Bassett, Jamie Lee Curtis, Brendan Fraser, Cate Blanchett, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson Feted at SBIFF 2023, Revisiting Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Tragically Common: Jamie Dack, Lily McInerny and Jonathan Tucker on Palm Trees and Power Lines. Kevin is neither rational nor articulate enough to identify his desire, that is, to have an authentic and fully realized relationship with his mother. Stripes provide Kevins character a continuity while shedding light upon his individuality. Read on for our full interview with Katy O'Brianand please remember to SUBSCRIBE to my channel for exclusive content! Children seldom get that attention, though. Eva has spent the events of the film in deep introspection, coming to terms with the fact that she was an abusive mother, and at least some of what happened grew out of that. We cling to guidelines like the length of Tilda Swinton 's hair to figure out where we are. What kind of a kitchen has empty counters? Kevin's killings, meanwhile, are the absent, invisible center of Ramsay's film. She asks Kevin why he didn't kill her. Little matters like washing blood red paint off the windows of her diminished home that angry residents have vandalized, become rituals of self-abnegation and penance. His attitude towards his son is warmer, but underneath there's no more depth than there is with Eva. The story goes back to the past to recreate the events that led Eva to her present discontent. True paternal love would have been expressed as abiding concern for the man his son could grow up to be if there really was a danger of mental illness, and result in the appropriate physical and mental health care to avoid a catastrophe. He hates Eva for a plethora of reasons her neglect, her coldness towards Kevin, and Franklins misguided overcompensation for the lack of Evas love. It's been 10 years since its world premiere at Cannes, and we need to talk about what made it such a haunting meditation on motherhood. This cycle is beautifully written and acted by Swinton, so much that you can't help but empathize with her despite her own assurances that every drop of blood her son ever spilt is on her hands, an image weaved throughout the movie. ROHAN: Considering that you had done Black Lightningand Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,and already gotten a small taste of superhero projects before stepping into this massive MCU project. Her husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) dismisses her concerns and uproots their bustling city life for a quiet home in the suburbs. KATY: Oh, I'd love to come back. She finally gets her excuse to abandon Kevin but doesn't act on it. How would I behave if basically the weight of a literal realm was on my shoulders? He is loving and affectionate with his father, Franklin (John C. Reilly), and has a way of making it clear that it's a deliberate charade designed only to hurt Eva. Contact | And the whole thought was just to fight and keep fighting? As a portrait of a deteriorating state of mind, "We Need to Talk About Kevin" is a masterful film. However it wasn't in the film I watched today and I can't find the scene anywhere..did I just imagine this scene?! Also, stripes are a striking feature that connects Kevins clothing sense from childhood to adolescence. In We Need to Talk about Kevin, Eva is literally on trial for parental negligence. 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