We need to talk about "We Need To Talk About Kevin"

I just saw Lynn Ramsey's new film, "We Need To Talk About Kevin", and I could not wait to come home and blog about it. What a powerful, affecting film! It stars Tilda Swinton as the mother of the eponymous Kevin, a teenager who has massacred his fellow students in high school. The narrative is fractured and disjointed; only allowing the audience to slowly piece together the plot. It is a film about guilt, grief, and struggling to find answers when there are no. Swinton gives an utterly breathtaking performance as detached and yet devastated Eva. The narrative vacillates between the present, as Eva numbly copes with her life after the incident in question, and the past, throughout Kevin's difficult childhood. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the work is it's supreme dramatic tension. The audience does not learn exactly what transpired at the school until the film's final act. This tension underscores the film with an electrifying current of unease and dread. Kevin can be described by all accounts as a textbook sociopath, and the audience sympathizes easily with Eva's complete frustration and despondency throughout his childhood. She is helpless to gain a shred of affection from her son, indeed he is outright malicious towards her. John C. Reiley plays Franklin, Kevin's father, who is utterly oblivious and deaf to Eva's concern. Indeed, Franklin waves aside many of the troubling aspects of Kevin's character and criticizes Eva for being too harsh. Warning signs of Kevin's rampage are plentiful, and yet his father, and society at large remain utterly blind.
Stylistically, the film (a master work of paradoxes) is gorgeous, yet watching it is a dolorous task. The work is punctuated by a symphony of reds. Perhaps one of the most striking uses of red is when Eva's house is splattered with red paint (the assailants are unnamed yet it is easily assumed that they are either neighborhood kids on Halloween, or victims families seeking retribution). Throughout the film we see Eva painstakingly scrubbing and chipping away at the paint, as if to wash away her own guilt. The scrubbing is a cathartic act, but it is, indeed, like Lady Macbeth furiously scrubbing her own hands, futile. The work is even difficult to listen to. We are inundated with painful, unrelenting noise, from infant Kevin bawling away to the drone of chainsaws. The soundtrack has a nice ironic touch by using chipper, poppy songs which through into relief the tension of the plot. A memorable scene is when Eva drives home from work on Halloween while Buddy Holly blithely sings "Everyday". As she drives, other people's children leer at her car as monsters and zombies, however the fact that it is Halloween drives the point home that Eva herself has birthed the true monster. In another scene, Eva furiously searches Kevin's room to find something, some secret he is hiding, whether it be drugs or porn. During this scene, The Beach Boys' "in My Room" plays. (side note: the rights must have cost A FORTUNE). Also the score is impeccable and imbues the film with great unease. A quick Google just informed me that it was scored by Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood, who did the wonderful score for There Will Be Blood.
See "We Need to Talk About Kevin"! It is by no means an easy film to digest, but a memorable, provoking, and haunting work. I dare say it's an essential piece of cinematic art. With so much garbage in the cinemas these days, it's quite refreshing to see something so deliberate and elegant.