We Need To Talk About Kevin
Lionel Shriver’s 2003 Orange Prize-winning novel, about the mother of a teenage boy who perpetrated a high-school massacre, is unnerving. However, the 2011 adaptation from director Lynne Ramsay and starring Tilda Swinton in a career-best performance is even more chilling and thought provoking. How does the film go to heights ever Shriver’s text could not? It all has to do with the approach.
Shriver wrote Kevin as an epistolary novel, a series of letters from mournful mother Eva Khatchadourian to her estranged husband, as she comes to grips with her feelings about her criminal son. The viewer sits right in Eva’s shattered state, as we read about her disdain for her eldest boy for much of his adolescence and the conflicted relationship they had.
However, Ramsay plunges deeper into Eva’s chaotic psyche by eschewing the letters and filling the screen with vivid colours that communicate the protagonist’s pain boldly. A ticking clock pounds on the soundtrack, trickling a constant feeling of dread or alarm. With her expressionistic use of bloody reds that pop up throughout, Ramsay helps the viewer enter the character’s tortured subconscious. With that direction, atop a gaunt, gripping performance from Swinton, who holds so much resistance on the inside, the film adaptation achieves an even more unsettling drama.