This is the fear of parenthood. The truth to motherhood is a harsh one. She asks Kevin why he didn't kill her. Kevin is seen at three ages. In front of his mother, Kevin is often a difficult, menacing and unresponsive boy. Kevin gets taught about sex from his mother but he already knows what it is and calls it "fucking". We gather she didn't want to get pregnant, isn't sure why she's married, is a mother who tries to mask hostility with superficial kindness. And of course from there, we learn he perpetrates a mass killing at a school. I mean, there's no room for the leader of the rebellion to give up. But Kevin is just getting started, and his final act will be be Kevin's mother struggles to love her strange child, despite the increasingly dangerous things he says and does as he grows up. That's the underlying message of We Need to Talk about Kevin, Lynne Ramsey's remarkable allegory on the transcendent nature of relationships. "We Need to Talk About Kevin" leans into that debate, showcasing a resentful mother, a passive father, and a child with an untreated mental illness. Before the film opens, the character referred to in the title of Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin, at the age of 15, has massacred a number of his fellow schoolmates. 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. While Eva is shown throughout the film to be indifferent toward her son, Kevin's actions are fueled by his desire to spite her. Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. Although these two terms are often used interchangeably in colloquial use, there are some mild differences between these two categories of personality disorders. Yet it is in those infrequent instances of relief, conversion and mercy that the film finds its identity and direction. The movie we see is her collecting every horrible interaction she ever had with her son and putting it under the umbrella of "things I did," because the only way she can cope with the insanity of what her son did is by fitting it to a narrative where she's responsible. As a portrait of a deteriorating state of mind, "We Need to Talk About Kevin" is a masterful film. Or did Kevin turned this way because she messed him up from the very birth. Eva repeatedly tries and fails to create a bond with her son according to traditional societal expectations. Speaking with O'Brian following the film's release, she shared her experience on working on the biggest project of her career and how she and director Peyton Reed crafted an elaborate backstory for the leader of the rebellion. 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. The past and present intertwine as Eva recalls Kevins formative years from childhood to adolescence, hoping for clues on what went wrong. 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. For much of the film, she lives with her husband, son and daughter in an expensive suburban home, and when we realize they've lived there for several years, we begin to wonder, how can four people occupy a home for over a decade and not accumulate anything? 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. It's a cyclical pattern, making it impossible to hold just one person accountable for everything. Does she ever. The point here is not to understand Kevin at all. KATY: We had this whole scene where we're all cheering at the end kind of thing. Kevin knows that Celia is his mothers favorite offspring, and he goes to great lengths to make his mother feel uncomfortable. When Kevin paints Evas room with color splashes, Eva thinks that Kevin wanted to ruin the room, but maybe he really wanted to make it more special. Kevin, it seems, has a method to his madness. Likewise, don't respond to trollish comments; just report them and ignore them. In a film otherwise devoid of hope, these subtle suggestions give the audience a sense of comfort. As Robin Hood, little Kevin appears in a similar-looking shirt. At first glance, it would seem that Kevin is yet another installment in the pantheon of post-modern films intent upon assaulting the human desire to give meaning to the world. Near the top of the list of the worst movies to watch on Mother's Day is "We Need to Talk About Kevin." About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators . The ending of the film leaves Eva's fate up in the air. Eva's point of view is obviously not reliable, and her segments are intended to portray that she's entered a cycle of deep self-abuse over having raised a psychopath. Kevin is seen to be wearing short clothes most of the time, like when Eva takes him out for mini-golfing. Thats the underlying message of We Need to Talk about Kevin, Lynne Ramseys remarkable allegory on the transcendent nature of relationships. See movies like "The innocents" (1961, Jack Clayton) (pay attention to the title) and "The omen" (1976, Richard Donner). So, his dressing sense is perhaps not an indictment of his bitterness. 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. Kevin examines both our darkest moments and those slivers of Grace that sustain us. These people live there, but they've never moved in. Kids banging on the door on Halloween in the present evokes a memory of young Kevin throwing all his food at the fridge. There's the Good Mother, like Diane Freeling who travels to another dimension to save her daughter in Poltergeist. There is no pattern. She lives with the guilt of what her son did, on top of the guilt of knowing she did nothing about the various warning signs. Genres: Psychological Drama, Family Drama. Now I'm not so sure." But Eva is incapable of showing him the love that he deserves, even after trying her best. This turns out to be some sort of annual Italian tomato festival, but the image is disturbing. Rated R But Kevin is just getting started, and his final act will be beyond anything anyone imagined. She is less interested in the nature vs nurture debate, more in the crippling weight of societal expectations of motherhood. I think that she and Jentorra had a huge past together. By provoking her, Kevin is able to get some precious emotional honesty out of her. Author Lionel Shriver on her early writing, politics, essential reading list and persevering out of 'sheer spite'. So is Amelia in The Babadook. SPOILERS AHEAD. Kevin is neither rational nor articulate enough to identify his desire, that is, to have an authentic and fully realized relationship with his mother. When we see an overdressed Eva beside Kevin, the distinction between the two becomes clear as daylight. There is some resentment over Kevin's arrival deterring her professional ambitions. From here he becomes a sociopathic teen with a rather keen interest in archery. Alienated from friends and community, all she has left is her son. How difficult was it to play the straight woman when everyone around you gets to be fairly silly in the early scenes? Kevin is far too malevolent, which might work in a Rosemary's Baby horror context, but not here (admittedly it does verge on horror at times but ultimately we are asked to empathise with Eva's travails as a mother). Plus, she also touches on a potentially big deleted scene that would've seen her cross paths with Krylar (Bill Murray) and teases possible beef with Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer). The real horror in the movie is society's dogmatic conception of motherhood, and the pressure to live up to it. We cling to guidelines like the length of Tilda Swinton's hair to figure out where we are. But Kevin is just getting started, and his final act will be beyond anything anyone imagined. Shortly after the incident with Celia, Kevin and his parents have a confrontation at the dining table. Firstpost - All Rights Reserved. None of this is done in a straightforward fashion. Sign up for weekly updates from Busted Halo! A flashback, from long before Kevin was born, shows Eva at La Tomatina, celebrating with the crowd. Motherhood was therefore intended as a punishment.. In We Need to Talk about Kevin, Eva is literally on trial for parental negligence. The flaws of this largely overwrought story belong not so much to Ramsay as filmmaker as to Shriver's source novel. Eva Khatchadourian, a former travelogue writer, lives in a rundown shack in an American suburb and goes to meet her son. Stripes provide Kevins character a continuity while shedding light upon his individuality. Kevins clothes are also an avenue to memories for Eva, and in the end, Eva irons and stacks up Kevins clothes in a drawer in the hope that her son will return from prison. I got to try some fight choreo, but all in all, yeah, it helped me prepare, I will say I was much more excited to be a good guy instead of a lame, side character, bad guy. Ambivalent toward motherhood, Eva struggles to care about her increasingly cruel son, Kevin (Ezra Miller). The novel by Lionel Shriver relates the story through a series of letters Eva writes to her husband Franklin. Kevins reaction is an indictment of both Eva and audiences expectations and their desire for his complicity in perpetrating the fraud. All of the performances are secondary to an urgently compelling narrative that is both agonizing to witness and impossible to look away from. By contrast with Elephant's oddly diffident lyricism, We Need To Talk About Kevin's expressionistic naturalism has a roiling, post-traumatic nonlinearity. It was definitely a challenge to play the straight character to these guys, but it was also kind of like, okay, this is my role. Catherine George managed the costume department impeccably well, with a slight touch of retro. Sometimes Zuzu's petals are all you have to hold onto. His attitude towards his son is warmer, but underneath there's no more depth than there is with Eva. But it's also pretty surface level. His attitude towards his son is warmer, but underneath there's no more depth than there is with Eva. In a fit of rage at Kevin's soiling his diapers (at 7), Eva throws him down and breaks his arm. We find ourselves inside the mind of a woman whose psychopathic son has driven her over the edge. As he grows up, we see him in a blue t-shirt, and consecutively, in a bland white one. ROHAN: Since Jentorra is the leader of the rebellion, was there anything specificyou tried to channel or watch to get into her headspace? But Kevin is just getting started, and his final act will be beyond anything anyone imagined. A demon seed. While Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumaniadidn't bring back several mainstays of the wider Ant-Man family, the film did introduce a number of new allies, namely Jentorra and her Freedom Fighters. to revoke its approval of the two main drugs used for medication abortion in the United States. And it works - Eva's confrontation was brutally dishonest, but after his reaction she's barely containing her seething rage and the truth of it is all over her face. Eva gets pregnant for a second time and gives birth to a little daughter Celia. Franklin, on the other hand, does not give him a path to honest interactions. The most cynical, nihilistic, misanthropic films ever made. We see Kevin as a troubled kid who may need greater care. In this one, it is Kevin's triumph. 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