Right from the title, this is suspect. That's a seriously unwieldy, awkward title – not sure there'll be any T-shirts of that one. And there also won't be any T-shirts because nobody would ever want to touch such an appalling film. We Need To Talk About Kevin is a miserable film and I am here to tell you why.
Director: Lynne Ramsay
Starring: Tilda Swinton, Ezra Miller
I guess this is one of those 'evil kid' movies that was for some reason popular through the years – like the Omen, the Good Son, and so on. Only this time he gets to grow up and we see that it's 100% what you'd expect, a violent sociopath that makes American Psycho look like a well adjusted individual. Who needs surprises in a movie anyway, right?
The movie is done in a jumbled fashion where scenes are shown out of order, for no real discernible reason. I guess they wanted to create some kind of tension or mystery, but the effect this creates is just a simulation of walking into a meeting halfway through and missing all context. For like the first 20 minutes, I was just scratching my head – it was too difficult to tell what the actual story was. There are a few scenes of Tilda Swinton's main character Eva being bombarded with red paint on her house and screamed threats that she's a murderer, a few scenes of her and John C. Reilly as the husband playing with small children and some others of Eva in some other country doing activist work. None of it is put together well. It's like if a small child holding a jigsaw puzzle sneezed and dropped all the pieces everywhere, and then we just made that into a movie to placate him.
I guess eventually we start to see the real story – Eva's son Kevin is, shock and awe, a weird, bad kid! He does wacky shit like mess up Eva's paintings and cry all the time when she's holding him. Wow. What a truly horrible thing and you deserve sympathy more than other people. Though there's at least one scene where she's holding him as a baby and says, with real malice, that she was happy before Kevin was born and now just wants to cry all the time I guess. Gee, real surprise he didn't turn out well... we never return to this again, but honestly, I'd love to see a smarter movie actually tackle bad parenting like that. Too bad this one isn't it.
The movie isn't a fan of brevity or getting to the point, as we cycle through endless vague time-hopping scenes, like a drunk Dr. Who episode, switching from a miserable and enervated looking Eva trying to keep afoot when everyone hates her, to Eva with her family and kids in the past. There are a lot of just boring as fuck scenes of Eva in some office building that finally hires her. And there's one set at Halloween when an army of awful children pound on the windows screaming for candy – Jesus. Where do kids act like this? I want to know so I can recommend we quarantine that hellish place for all of time.
When it isn't showing those pointless scenes, you get downright awful and miserable scenes of Eva trying to relate to her hopelessly sociopathic son. I love the one scene where she's telling him he can decorate his own room to show his personality, and he goes “what personality?” The kid's delivery is just so hammy and the line itself is such dogshit that I'm tempted to say the kid could've done better if he wrote his own dialogue.
There's also a scene where Eva is teaching him to count and, to prove he can, counts from one to 50 in a very obnoxious manner, and then shits his pants. I guess the pants-shitting was meant to rebel against his mother. Truly this kid is the next incarnate of punk rock. Then he farts as he's walking away and she throws him against a wall, breaking his arm. More of those amazing parenting skills! I'm amazed this woman could ever create a child who wasn't well adjusted!
Honestly, I get it – the kid is “just evil.” It isn't the mother's fault because this is a stupid movie that doesn't care about actually saying anything. This is just agonizing, dull scene after agonizing, dull scene of the kid tormenting her and, after she breaks his arm, basically blackmailing her. There's a scene where he makes her go home instead of getting something she needs at the store because of that. Wow, what a riveting scene if you're 89 years old and in a coma. A real nail-biter.
It isn't any better when they grow up and there's a second kid born – if anything, it gets worse when Kevin is a teenager because now he is as pretentious as your average dude-bro atheist philosophy “expert,” only also a psycho fuck. There's a scene where he jerks off in front of his mom, if you were wondering if there was. I know you were. And there's one where he gives her computer a virus. All of these scenes are as bad as any bad movies you ever saw. There's no redeeming value.
I especially love the scene where Eva takes Kevin out for a day for them to just talk, because it's everything bad about the movie – there's one part where they're at some outside eatery and Eva totally randomly says she hates fat people because they're just fat due to eating too much and are unhealthy for that reason. It's totally out of nowhere. Like a scriptwriter just had a bunch of hateful shit he wanted to get off his chest.
Then, at another restaurant later, Kevin shows off those college atheist philosophy reading skills again and pompously “predicts” what his mother is going to do – scold him for fucking girls and then cry because she drank too much wine. It's a carnival of dog shit writing, just terrible garbage spewing everywhere like a malfunctioning sewer. But then, that IS the movie.
Perhaps the crowning moment of awful parenting goes to John C. Reilly as the dad. After an entire movie where he has done nothing except scoff at Eva and say she's dumb for thinking Kevin is bad, he gives Kevin a fucking bow and arrow for Christmas. I can see liking his son – but for Reilly to see that dead-eyed piece of shit he fathered no doubt under the influence of alcohol, and give him a fucking weapon – that's insane to me and the biggest plothole in the film. This kid was never even close to sympathetic, even when Eva broke his arm earlier. He's been shown to be a one-dimensional evil psycho from the beginning. There's no nuance here and it's just crazy that his dad is so blind to this.
It's no surprise that the whole thing ends in a school shooting? He takes a bow and arrow to school like the only angry fucker in America to not have money to buy a gun. He isn't even the real deal – how many of these guys get their sole weapon from their fathers? I think this kid is weak as hell.
I'm making a lot of jokes here, but hey, the movie isn't taking this issue even remotely seriously. What's the message here? A bad kid will turn out bad if you parent him in a terrible way, I guess, and even that's a stretch to say there's any message at all. There's no real exploration of why he turned out that way or what we can do about it – all the movie wants to do is show shocking things for no reason. So fuck that.
Image copyright of its original owner, I don't own it.
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