We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
Directed by Lynne Ramsay
After her son Kevin commits a horrific act, troubled mother Eva reflects on her complicated relationship with her disturbed son as he grew from a toddler into a teenager.
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30 films that influenced We Need to Talk About Kevin
What critics say influenced We Need to Talk About Kevin
Other movies have told stories based around young men who lash out at society, but Ramsay blends the reality of that sort of situation with the type of bad kid horror subgenre seen in films such as "The Bad Seed," "The Omen" or "Orphan," only basing it in reality rather than doing it as a sensationalist genre film.
It's found in such brilliant short fictions as Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (filmed as The Innocents), Paul Bowles's Pages From Cold Point and, more recently, Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child, as well as horror movies such as The Bad Seed and The Omen and in real life in the James Bulger case.
Kevin is a horror movie trope -- ripped from movies like The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, The Omen, and the recent Orphan -- far too menacing to be even remotely connected with anything real.
Motiveless malignancy in cinema youngsters is no rarity though, except for blood-will-out The Bad Seed, ordinarily from demonic possession.
From "The Bad Seed" to "The Omen" to "The Good Son," kids have been creeping us out for years.
As a result, "We Need to Talk About Kevin" comes across less like the powerful and profound drama that it clearly wants to be and more like an excruciatingly arty version of the old horror-exploitation standby of the killer kid, a trope that has been deployed in the past in works ranging from the Broadway-sanctified "The Bad Seed" to grindhouse insanity like "The Children" to mass-market takes like the Vera Farmiga vehicles "Joshua" and "Orphan."
It first entered mainstream cinema in Peter Bogdanovich's early film Targets (inspired by Charles Whitman's killing spree on the University of Texas campus in 1966), and has since been seen in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and Gus Van Sant's Elephant.
For that matter, the Columbine school-shooting story was better told in Gus Van Sant's Elephant (2003) and in the lesser-known Zero Day (2003).
There have been innumerable films made turning children and teens into vessels to be feared rather than fawned over (2007's " Joshua " is a recent unsung treasure), and ever since the tragic 1999 events at Columbine there have been almost as many exploring the cause-and-effect?or lack of solid answers?behind school violence (among them, 2002's unforgettable " Elephant " and 2008's " The Life Before Her Eyes ").
Films like Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant” and “Beautiful Boy” explore the impact of the horrific incidences that all stem from that terrible day in Columbine in 1999.
Ramsay stays anchored enough to avoid the drifty dream of say, Gus Van Sant’s similarly-themed Elephant but still, the film is dominated by the aesthetic impulse.
Gus Van Sant's Columbine-inspired Elephant, still the best film made on the subject, sidesteps that question in favor of an attempt to find meaning in the mundane details of the event as it plays out for the victims and the perpetrators.
Although based on a novel by Lionel Shriver, it seems to be a direct descendant of The Bad Seed, the 1956 thriller with Patty McCormack's Oscar-nominated turn as a murderous moppet (let's not waste time on 1993's similarly themed The Good Son; as a homicidal brat, Macaulay Culkin was about as menacing as an inchworm).
(His pathological coldness recalls Macaulay Culkin’s character in “The Good Son.”) Kevin’s idea of playing with his younger sister (Ursula Parker) consists of turning the vacuum cleaner on her hair.
It first entered mainstream cinema in Peter Bogdanovich's early film Targets (inspired by Charles Whitman's killing spree on the University of Texas campus in 1966), and has since been seen in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and Gus Van Sant's Elephant.
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The film is enlivened with spontaneity because of this unorthodox approach, and also a classical, hallucinatory horror vibe in the vein of 1968's "Rosemary's Baby."
Kevin (Ezra Miller) may not have his father's eyes, but Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Lionel Shriver's novel rivals Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, and this year's Twilight installment as a negative advertisement for childbearing.
What would the baby of Rosemary’s Baby be like as a teenager?
Adapting Lionel Shriver’s novel of the same name, Lynne Ramsay must like the strong subjective moments of Rosemary’s Baby.
Photographed in a palette of jarring color (the red splatters of paint thrown on Eva's car, on Eva's house, by angry neighbors are, in fact, beautiful), We Need to Talk About Kevin really belongs in the genre of parental-dread scare flicks like The Demon Seed, Damien: Omen II, and Rosemary's Baby, although there's no science fiction or Satanic overlay.
A lot of actresses have won Oscars and never matched that career peak but Swinton has gotten even better since her Academy Award with stunning work in “Julia,” “I Am Love,” and, now, “We Need to Talk About Kevin.”
It's found in such brilliant short fictions as Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (filmed as The Innocents), Paul Bowles's Pages From Cold Point and, more recently, Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child, as well as horror movies such as The Bad Seed and The Omen and in real life in the James Bulger case.
In many ways, in fact, the film is almost as nonverbal as the newly restored version of Georges Melies' 1902 A Trip to the Moon, shown earlier at the Festival de Cannes.
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It first entered mainstream cinema in Peter Bogdanovich's early film Targets (inspired by Charles Whitman's killing spree on the University of Texas campus in 1966), and has since been seen in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and Gus Van Sant's Elephant.
For that matter, the Columbine school-shooting story was better told in Gus Van Sant's Elephant (2003) and in the lesser-known Zero Day (2003).