We Need to Talk About Kevin
We Need to Talk About Kevin
“Every parent’s nightmare” would be the evening news boilerplate description of “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” Lynne Ramsay’s disturbing movie about the mother of a child who goes on a killing spree at his high school. That trite phrase is accurate in an almost technical sense: Ms. Ramsay (who adapted Lionel Shriver’s novel with Rory Stewart Kinnear) follows a kind of dream logic in telling a chronologically splintered story, weaving patterns of associated images and sensations into an intense and claustrophobic web of fear.
“We Need to Talk About Kevin,” with help from Seamus McGarvey’s fever-flushed cinematography and Jonny Greenwood’s heartsick, throbbing score, saturates the senses like illness or bad weather. It is beautiful and demonic, like Kevin himself, and the bad feelings it induces are likely to be accompanied by helpless and stricken admiration. You may well need to talk about it afterward, but then again, you may be left speechless.