A mother and her son

We Need to Talk About Kevin was released in the autumn of 2011 and is based on a book by Lionel Shriver. It tells the story of a troubled young boy who becomes a school shooter, but the relationship between Kevin and his mother is also a big theme. It hasn’t gained the huge international attention it in my opinion should have. This might be because most people only look for entertainment when watching a movie, and We Need to Talk About Kevin doesn’t offer that. It makes you uncomfortable, scared, hopeful, furious, sad, thoughtful, and many other things but leaves no-one cold. It’s not a movie you can watch, enjoy and forget the next day.

When I saw We Need to Talk About Kevin I was impressed by how well it matches Shriver’s book. Both the movie and the book start off a little slowly and it might be hard to follow the story at first, but if you just concentrate and get past the beginning you’ll be mesmerized and unable to stop watching or reading. The actors, especially Tilda Swinton as Kevin’s mother and Ezra Miller as Kevin himself, have done an amazing job. They haven’t been given that many lines, which means that a bulk of the acting and communication has to happen via gestures, expressions and body language. Miller is magnificent as the cold, indifferent and twisted teen-aged boy whose main goal in life seems to be making his mother’s life miserable. Swinton manages to impersonate the mix of confusion, disgust and unconditional love her character feels towards her son in a startlingly believable way. 

We Need to Talk About Kevin has many themes, the most obvious one being school shootings and the amount of pain they cause. I like that Shriver and the movie’s producers haven’t settled on filming one and a half hours of gory details of how the shooting itself happens but have tried their best to get to the bottom of why some people feel so desperate that they think the only way to ease their pain is to cause it to someone else. Kevin is not described as crazy or under the influence of violent computer games, but simply a victim of the modern world. He feels that nothing matters, it’s all so shallow and meaningless, and when nothing matters there aren’t that many restrictions limiting your actions.

One of the movie’s important themes is built around Kevin’s mother. She’s not the motherly type to begin with and even when Kevin is born she finds it difficult to love him like a mother is supposed to. In this kind of a situation, can you blame it on the mother? This seems far-fetched to me, since Kevin’s little sister grew up to be perfectly ordinary. Then again, if Kevin wasn’t getting any bad influences from around him, it would mean he was born a bad person, and I don’t feel comfortable believing this either.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of those movies that stays with you long after the credits have scrolled off the screen. It keeps you in its grip until the last shocking revelations, but still in the end doesn’t leave you completely lost and hopeless. It’s a timeless story of terror, guilt and regret, but ultimately of hope in humankind.