Type the words ‘every parents nightmare’ into the movie blogosphere right now and guaranteed you’ll end up staring Tilda Swinton in the face, this time - in her pendular swings between glam and gaunt - resembling more the latter. Lynne Ramsay’s screen adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, about the mother of a teenage boy who commits a high school massacre, is an absolutely terrifying film, and the baddy isn’t the obvious. Forget the sinister murdering son - the real horror is suburban life, with its eternal clutches and sleekit facade, as it tricks wanderlust protagonist Eva into thinking that having a family and settling down won’t ruin her life.
Family is binding. Many young people, just back from their gap year and planning to hug a chimpanzee in Thailand next summer, have that thought at the back of their head that one day they’ll do the parent thing; fulfill their lives conventionally. We Need to Talk About Kevin isn’t going to let you do this. You’ll be too damn scared that the bundle of joy you give birth too will actively and persistently ruin your life.
Just why we find children so terrifying is open to speculation. For me, it is the potential; that lovely little princess niece of yours might go on to become a doctor! Yeah, a Haroldette Shipman maybe... You just don’t know. It reminds me of a short story called ‘Genesis and Catastrophe’ in Roald Dahl’s Kiss Kiss, a collection of short stories for adults. The story tells of a mother’s difficult birth, and both she and baby pull through. How lovely. Plot spoiler alert: the baby’s name is Adolf Hitler.
Visually, the film is obviously a book adaption. The whole thing reads like prose from a page shoved up on the screen. Much of the mood and discomfort is told in aesthetics. Packed with repulsive imagery, food is repeatedly shown spilling and festering, giving an air of decay and unease, and also providing a symbol for the ubiquitous everyday consumerism that forces us to choose tame, materialistic, suburban life.
The consumerism that so often grates moody teenagers up the wrong way.
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