Tilda Swinton’s Eva has difficulties communicating with her teenage son (Ezra Miller) in Lynn Ramsay’s WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN.


(a trait that Eva imitates at one point, mocking his relationship with his father), dismissing as false any attempts she makes to reach him emotionally (although there’s a disconcerting interlude when he falls ill and relies on her to the exclusion of his father), defacing or, on another interpretation, re- painting her memorabilia to his own taste because they mean nothing to him. While it’s clear that his sister is conceived as an alternative to him—to “what boys do”—he seems to find some contact in their relationship, though by no means enough. Interviewed on television after his arrest, he sees himself as offering meaningfulness to the audi- ence in their otherwise futile lives. He collects com- puter viruses precisely because “there is no point—that’s the point.” If he feels that causing his parents’ proposed divorce lends him signifi- cance (“I am the context,” he remarks), this sug- gests that he finds meaning only in destruction. During his illness, Eva reads about Robin Hood’s archery contest to him, but the route by which this leads to the final massacre is left for us to trace.


In an interview, Ezra Miller maintains that Kevin is simply so intelligent that he sees through his parents’ pretenses—that he isn’t a sociopath. Well, never trust the artist and so forth. Intelligence hardly precludes sociopathy; when allied to emo- tional stunting, it may very well create the con- dition, and Kevin surely fits the profile of the killer who considers himself undervalued by and


superior to the world, and so commits his crimes in a bid to impose his own view of himself on it. More problematically, the makers appear to see Eva’s memories as to some extent unreliable, rais- ing the question of whether it’s the father (John C. Reilly) who refuses to see what’s happening, or whether we share Eva’s viewpoint to the exclusion of the truth. While this approach to viewing a film can be productive—it’s useful with Cameron’s TI- TANIC, for instance—I wonder if it doesn’t under- mine the moral structure of WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN; it could be seen as a kind of moral sleight of hand. Perhaps it’s an inevitable conse- quence of restricting the narrative entirely to Eva’s experience, which means that apart from her imag- ined glimpses of the massacre, we have no sense at all of Kevin’s life outside the family—presum- ably we’re meant to conclude he has no friends and feels the same contempt for his schoolmates. Still, the film’s keynote is unsureness, a quality that is made explicit in the final scene, where it seems to contain at least a hint of redemption or conciliation—a starting point, at any rate. The Blu-ray transfer celebrates the film’s vi- sual richness and intricate allusive soundtrack. It is also available from Artificial Eye on Region B, but the Oscilloscope edition offers substantially more extras, including a documentary on the making and, importantly, footage of the Tomatina festival, which contextualizes the otherwise bewildering first scene of the film.


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