On Demand Weekly

On Demand Weekly provides new movie reviews of hot movies on demand from the POV of watching from the comfort of your home. Today’s review: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (Oscilloscope Labs).

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN
A mother’s love doesn’t always cut it…
By Cynthia Kane

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN instantly elicits haunting reminders of the premeditated high school massacre at Columbine now some thirteen years ago. I remember at the time wondering where the parents were in all this, and how could they live with themselves after the tragedy, the graphic murders and suicides. How does a parent go on? How do they look at themselves in the mirror knowing they gave life to a killer, a sick, psychotic mind? Does the tragedy in the end lie with themselves?

A few years later, I was listening to a BBC World Service radio program where they were discussing Lionel Shriver’s 2003 novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin after which I ran out to a bookstore, bought and read in one sitting. Disquieting and provocative, this novel searches into the mind and soul of one such mother trying to understand the reason as to why her 15 year-old son murders not only his classmates and teachers, but his overly loving father and younger sister in a single day. Thus I have been waiting many more years for this film to be made and when I heard Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay (RATCATCHER, MORVERN CALLAR) would adapt the screenplay from the novel, direct and Tilda Swinton would play the role of Eva, the mother, I knew it would not disappoint.

What’s uncommon and extraordinary here is Ramsay takes the novel and makes the film her own and a more suitable or honorable adaptation I cannot imagine. The book and the film live singularly on their own, but respect each other simultaneously. Ramsay’s reoccurring themes in her work: the inveterate, unresolvable themes of grief, guilt and, above all, death and its aftermath, belong here in this tale where a mother in the days, months, weeks, maybe even years after her child’s heinous crimes tries to make sense of it all.

It took Lynne Ramsay a long time to make this film. A great and complicated book is never easy to adapt. As seen by Eva’s point of view, it’s difficult to grasp her as a completely reliable narrator as she’s reflecting after-the-fact, trying to understand what happened, what might have changed things, was it her fault or is her son simply a psychotic psychopath for whom nothing could have been done to change the tragic unfolding of events. We are along for the ride, inside of the head of a mother, a woman destroyed by her son’s actions, trying to make sense of it with her. It’s at once a thriller, a cautionary tale.

It rises to the level of classical tragedy.