WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

My goal for 2023 was to see films that included some cinematic importance, notability, or significance. One movie that made this year’s agenda is We Need to Talk About Kevin, released in 2011. While the subject matter is distressing, the film itself is an intimidating and unique experience.

The movie never once maintains any sort of linear storytelling. It is snippets of time strung together through the mind of the movie’s central character, Eva (Tilda Swinton). We see her in current time attempting to find and keep a job, while simultaneously seeing her as a free-spirited young woman enjoying a tomato festival in Spain, as a woman raising a disobedient toddler, as a woman who has no interest in having children, as a woman driving to some ominous event, as a woman raising two children, as a woman being ignored by her husband, as a woman seeking peace, as a woman avoiding social interaction with those in her town, and as a woman trying to figure out her antagonistic teen-age son. As the scenes alternate, the only visual clues we have to try and link all these memories together are the length of Eva’s hair or the residence in which she is currently residing.

Directed by Lynne Ramsay, We Need to Talk About Kevin is a tale that you can’t turn away from because you desperately want to link all these alternating events together. There are two constants throughout. One is that red is highlighted everywhere. Red tomatoes, red police sirens, red jam, red paint…. red flows throughout her memories. The other constant is Ava’s relationship with her son Kevin (played superbly by Jasper Newell as a toddler and by Ezra Miller as a teenager), that consistency being that Kevin's existence seems only to be one of sadistically making his mother’s life miserable.

This is a disjointed journey through the mind of a woman who relives moments of her life over and over, and those moments are almost void of happiness or personal fulfillment. I originally was disappointed that the relationship between Eva and her fairly absent husband wasn’t fleshed out more. I also found it odd that in one period of the film’s scenes, the family lived in this enormous house for years yet never seemed to acquire any furniture. But looking at all the scenes through Ava’s eyes (memory) rather than through the director’s editing, it becomes obvious that these details are superfluous to the way Eva remembers these moments in her own mind over and over again. She won’t remember furniture because it didn’t matter, but she will remember a red jam sandwich with vivid detail.

Once all the pieces come together for the viewer, we are left with a woman broken beyond most human’s understanding. But we feel her, we now know her, and we hope never to have to be her. When the movie finds its conclusion, it isn’t Kevin that we are left needing to talk about, it’s Tilda Swinton and her masterful performance.