WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN
In Lynne Ramsay’s first film in nine years, We Need to Talk About Kevin, ‘the problem with no name’ becomes named. Giving up her dream career as an ‘adventurer,’ Tilda Swinton becomes a mother and caretaker for her newborn son; Ramsay’s conceit is to play this off not as merely an investigation of the ‘feminine mystique,’ but as a complete living fucking nightmare. Kevin is pure evil, up and down, his mother swears to it. And although he acts well-adjusted around everyone else, he is fully committed to psychologically terrorizing his mother. The final act of slaughter is devastating not only for its violence, but for Swinton, for its coherence.
We Need to Talk About Kevin flits about every which way and its narrative construction is what gives the film its gravitational pull. Jumping between timelines with little signposting or pattern, the film becomes an associative montage, held partially together by Swinton’s panicked psyche. Scene-to-scene transitions happen through visual rhymes, giving outstanding form to the discordance of a traumatized mind. Add to this the audio cues: this film has the best sound design of the year. Small, constant sounds are honed in on; amplified. Kevin crushing cereal or breaking crayons; a neighbor bouncing a basketball or mowing his grass. Sound bridges in this case don’t come across as annoying, but serve the same purpose as the visual rhyming: shifting emphasis to the flexibility of the narrative and the looseness of concentration. It lets the film embody Swinton’s struggle to hear herself think, to unclutter her mind.
Ramsay’s use of horror is also occasionally inspired. The struggle in a film like this is to prevent Kevin from seeming to have walked out of a B-movie and in that department the results are mixed. There’s no doubt about it that this kid is a psychopath, but as psychopathy in movies goes, I found this one convincing if frustrating. But, of course, it is in the nature of psychopaths to be frustrating. Fanatically convinced that their adolescent rantings about the dehumanizing effects of television and society’s infatuation with mass murder make them somehow prophets, as opposed to third-rate op-ed writers, is nothing, one feels, that a good ten years couldn’t cure. What fifteen-year old hasn’t mistaken their incomplexity for genius? Psychopaths, of course, don’t have time to learn, as dedicated as they are to sadism and as convinced as they are of their superiority. As a depiction of how teens murder teens, the film isn’t terribly convincing and is a bit too spruced up in its cleverness, but as a depiction of the dead-end psychopathic mindset, it’s rightly compelling. (It should be noted that I’m drawing a fair amount of my perspective on this from Dave Cullen’s admired book Columbine, which, in terms of their mentality, seems to indicate similarities between our fictional Kevin and the real-life Eric Harris).
Ramsay does score a couple of terrifying grace notes though—early on in the film we approach Celia, Swinton’s daughter, from behind as she sits at a counter. When she turns around, she is wearing a massive grey eye patch. There’s something shocking about this reveal, so matter of fact in its ordinariness but also in its unmistakable dread. Later, in a doctor’s office, the walls are covered with images of clowns. Maybe kids are charmed by these, but again, it’s hard to shake the feeling of unease. Ramsay’s skill in moments like these is reminiscent of the offbeat, undermining horror of something like Twin Peaks. It’s not overt, but there’s no mistaking it.
Ramsay has said the film isn’t an ‘issue film,’ and we’re all the better for that, because any political significance is neutered: as mentioned, as a film about teens killing teens, this doesn’t tell us very much. But as a film about a woman beset on all sides, this one goes straight to the nerves. Expect it to round out my top ten.
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