We Need to Talk About Kevin

Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly in We Need to Talk About Kevin

Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin teeters on the brink of artistic overstatement, but I was won over by its visual dexterity and caustic edge. This 2011 feature stars Tilda Swinton as the mother of a teenaged mass murderer. The film is told in flashbacks and flash forwards, different hairstyles and a Led Zeppelin T-Shirt worn by a couple of characters clue us to our location within its timeline. John C. Reilly plays Swinton's spouse, an indicator of the film's tendency towards over determination. Swinton and Reilly are chalk and cheese, in no sense a believable couple. However, this is a film intent on portraying Reilly's character as a clueless man-child and that is Reilly's default casting (as in Step Brothers, Walk Hard, Talladega Nights..., etc.).

As an entertainment, the film is all too pervaded with unrelenting gloom and foreboding. Mental illness, downward mobility, anomie and alienation are the meat in this bitter stew. Nevertheless, Ms. Ramsay is so visually gifted and witty, I could stomach the film's nihilism. Her handling of the cast is adroit. All three young actors who handle the role of Kevin are creepily good. and Swinton has never been better, brandishing a killer American accent. Ramsay jettisoned some supporting characters from Lionel Shriver's novel and focuses more on the plight of Swinton's character. The film commences with Swinton reveling in blood red sensuality at La Tomatina, a Spanish festival celebrating Dionysian fertility. By film's end, she is reduced to scraping red paint off the white stucco of her tawdry suburban abode. This is a bold and pitiless film that reminds us that for some mothers, birth is a trauma that never ends.