A bright light appears outside. 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. Though unlike the Shakespearean character, the question of Evas guilt has a lot less cut-and-dried answer. Eva takes incessant trips down memory lane to cope with her past loss. We Need to Talk About Kevin : r/books. Thats the underlying message of We Need to Talk about Kevin, Lynne Ramseys remarkable allegory on the transcendent nature of relationships. GameStop Moderna Pfizer Johnson & Johnson AstraZeneca Walgreens Best Buy Novavax SpaceX Tesla. It doesn't gel with what has come before, where Eva seems to accept her son's innate cruelty, and is looking for a way to escape. Votes are used to help determine the most interesting content on RYM. Shortly after the incident with Celia, Kevin and his parents have a confrontation at the dining table. Starring: Tilda Swinton,John C. Reilly,Ezra Miller Watch all you want. She finally gets her excuse to abandon Kevin but doesn't act on it. Also, stripes are a striking feature that connects Kevins clothing sense from childhood to adolescence. This review of the film was originally published on December 22, 2011. This is why, in the final scene, he no longer knows why he performed the massacre. Kevin is a defiant baby who screams incessantly but never around Franklin. It suffers from an excess of clunky foreshadowing and there's very little I find believable about the characters' actions. However, the story's unflinching refusal to provide answers for who was responsible carries over. Eva Khatchadourian, a former travelogue writer, lives in a rundown shack in an American suburb and goes to meet her son. An important film that attempts to delve into the psychology behind the high school massacres we seem to read about in the news on a weekly basis. Try refreshing this page.If the problem persists, contact our support contact our support In an ordinary movie, there would be scenes in classrooms, meetings with counselors, heart-to-heart discussions between the parents. Read on for our full interview with Katy O'Brianand please remember to SUBSCRIBE to my channel for exclusive content! Their tumultuous relationship goes from annoyance over his smashing jammy bread onto the coffee table to feelings of fear after he stuffs the family pet down the garbage disposal. 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. So, me, I'm surrounded by comedy, and I have to bring the reality of what's going on. 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). Kevin's killings, meanwhile, are the absent, invisible center of Ramsay's film. March 1, 2023, 6:00 a.m. Shortly after, Eva goes back to the house. So we must find our Grace in the minuscule, and it is in these brief moments of consolation, these shafts of light under the door, that Kevin provides the deft sucker punch to the, by now, standard narrative benchmarks of despair, emptiness and futility which permeate contemporary film. In Maternal Horror Film: Melodrama and Motherhood, Sarah Arnold identifies how mothers as characters suffer from a Manichean oversimplification, or as she calls it the unstable ideology of idealised motherhood. Kevin, it seems, has a method to his madness. As Kevin develops, he refuses to be potty-trained, mocks Eva and rejects her attempts at physical affection. Eva can only play at being mommy, and so when Kevin refuses her attempts to breastfeed and is only appeased by the presence of his affable father, played by John C. Reilly, her whole world crashes down around her and her value as a person comes into question. Kevin keeps the secret of how this happens and a strange complicity develops between the mother and son. ComicBookMovie.com is a registered trademark and has been officially registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). None of that takes anything away from yet another deeply felt performance by the always-interesting Swinton. Outward appearances of mother and son match their steely interiority as neither suffers fools gladly and both abhor artifice and sentimentality. Menu. The real horror in the movie is society's dogmatic conception of motherhood, and the pressure to live up to it. The film explores and identifies the hope to be found in the ashes of Ground Zero and in the wake of Columbine while never once attempting to sugarcoat the real darkness and danger that exist in our world. Instead, maternal ambivalence is coded as horror. 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? 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). However, she created a pattern whereby she only expresses herself to Kevin through disgust and fear. It was a really short moment, and then yeah, I would have loved to have had some interaction with Janet, but that wasn't even in there. It's hard not to see some of Eva's frustration at her changed lifethey leave the city and she is left with most of the child careas manifesting in a kind of resentment of Kevin. How difficult was it to play the straight woman when everyone around you gets to be fairly silly in the early scenes? The sound of him savouring the juicy fruit a fruit he doesn't even like in deliberate crunches of sinister delight becomes unsettling when paired with the thought of Celia's lost eye. Though Ramsay does away with Eva as a first-person narrator in the film, she still retains Eva's point-of-view throughout. 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. We Need To Talk About Kevin - Behind the Scenes - Tilda Swinton Movie (2011) HD - YouTube 0:00 / 2:18 We Need To Talk About Kevin - Behind the Scenes - Tilda Swinton Movie. We Need to Talk about Kevin in fact needs to be talked about, as what it is attempting to do by marrying the darkest, most nihilistic components of contemporary cinema with a redemptive message is groundbreaking. However, we dont really know why Kevin kills his family. Indeed, one of. There are two really great examples of this: the first is the bow. Between the ages of 6 and 8 years old, played by Jasper Newell, he is a clever little monster who glares at Eva hurtfully, soils his pants deliberately and drives her into such a fury that she breaks his arm. Kevin appears in a short sleeve red shirt as a toddler. Would any interference have prevented him from becoming a killer? See production, box office & company info. Her husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) dismisses her concerns and uproots their bustling city life for a quiet home in the suburbs. 2003-2023 Best Little Sites, LLC. The novel explores themes of nihilism, motherhood, the relationship between violence and depravity, and much more. The Bad Mother refers to oppressive puritans like Margaret White in Carrie. Powered by WordPress.com VIP. She makes one feel her strung to the breaking point tension in scene after scene. This comes to a head when Kevin has learned that pooping his pants is the quickest way to his mother's heart, and the time she shows him the most attention - but that attention is always disgust. Did you work with her individually on creating some of that dynamic since Jentorra is someone that's been in this fight a long time versus Cassie who is just beginning her fight against Kang? I'd be happy to see what they come up with, but, they have more of the understanding of the wildness of the world that they're building. All logos and images used on this website are registered trademarks of their respective companies. Her emotional state doesnt change even when Kevin is born. Because children are normally associated with innocence, creepy children are a tried concept in horror films. The most cynical, nihilistic, misanthropic films ever made. His willful misbehaviors continue as his mother becomes more estranged from him. Index | Because Kevin is infallible to Franklin, he's also incapable of needing help, and as a result Franklin seems to have no respect to any sort of danger to his son, even giving a disturbed young man a lethal weapon just for fun on his fifteenth birthday - something that could even be considered an act in direct defiance of the reality of his son's deteriorating mental state, or even a dare. The story goes back to the past to recreate the events that led Eva to her present discontent. When he breaks his arm? There have been a lot of discussions nature vs. nurture, but I've been thinking she was not ok during pregnancy, usually postpartum depression starts after birth. That's a deeply human tale, and it calls to us, and I think that's why I see takes on the movie saying that it even encourages the viewer to think evil is in our nature and is immutable. He's aware of her feelings toward him, and throughout the film, points them out. ROHAN: Was there anything major cut that you remember shooting? Scan this QR code to download the app now. 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. 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." 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. It's so convincing that it has the opposite effect on us, convincing us of her innocence and her son's innate evil - how could someone so pitiful, so sorrowful, so emotionally sensitive be responsible for the development of a totally psychopathic mind? 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. 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. Psychology Today describes the "nature vs. nurture" debate as questioning how both elements impact a person's characteristics. Swinton gives an outstanding performance, somehow managing to repeatedly convey implacability and vulnerability in the same moment. Franklin's story is simpler but in some ways I think it's worse. After you see the film, think about it. He answers, I used to think I knew why, and now Im not so sure. This small act of hesitant humility is followed by Kevins embrace of his mother which can only be likened to the embrace received by that infamous scriptural progeny upon his arrival home. 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. Shriver welcomes the sharply divided interpretations, writing in the Harper Perennial P.S. For removal of copyrighted images, trademarks, or other issues, Contact Us. Eva rushes to the school to see Kevin getting arrested. Sign up for weekly updates from Busted Halo! Maybe everything else is intended to be a flashback, and the timeline begins when she finds out what Kevin did at his high school. 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. The colour red is a recurring motif in the film. A suspenseful and gripping psychological thriller, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN explores the relationship between a mother and her evil son. It's why vandals paint Evas house in red, and neighbours take out their anger on her. Still, the film should not be overshadowed by its leads performance, as is often the case with female Oscar nominees. It may not strike one as something extraordinary, but one needs to understand that Kevins mind is wired differently. It asks, "who is to blame when something horrific happens?". While the film isn't as explicit as the book, both versions of Eva are grappling with Kevin's final answer as they wonder if it's even worth feeling weighed down by the question of responsibility. Kevin is neither rational nor articulate enough to identify his desire, that is, to have an authentic and fully realized relationship with his mother. In a film otherwise devoid of hope, these subtle suggestions give the audience a sense of comfort. ", As with any book-to-film adaptation, some of the nuances were lost in translation. Who's there when Kevin gets sick? May 12, 2021 12:33:39 IST. A lawsuit could force the F.D.A. There seems to be almost no form of abuse she is not willing to take as belonging to her for what has happened. In Morvern Callar, Samantha Morton grieved her boyfriend's suicide. 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. I mean, there's no room for the leader of the rebellion to give up. Eva is attempting to play the part of mommy as defined by popular culture; the cooing, gooey, all-encompassing ubiquitousness to her child. She is less interested in the nature vs nurture debate, more in the crippling weight of societal expectations of motherhood. Stripping the screenplay off words, the disturbance arises from a seamless amalgamation of image and sound. 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. Her body can't absorb more punishment. What kind of a kitchen has empty counters? The film moves without any pattern between past, present and who knows when. Kids banging on the door on Halloween in the present evokes a memory of young Kevin throwing all his food at the fridge. Kevin knows that Celia is his mothers favorite offspring, and he goes to great lengths to make his mother feel uncomfortable. Kevin does not play ball, and he becomes increasingly manipulative. Near the top of the list of the worst movies to watch on Mother's Day is "We Need to Talk About Kevin." 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