The most plausible answer is that Kevin killed the family to hurt his mother. Starring Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly Most of the film in present time shows the ritual abuse and humiliation the bereft Eva suffers from the community that she continues to live in after Kevin's deeds. In the next sequence, he appears in a loose white shirt. otakucode 11 yr. ago Although the act is enhanced through visual obscurity and concealment, we get the idea that Kevin kills a few of his classmates in the locked auditorium. Kevin replies that he thought he knew why but now hes not sure anymore. Cookie Notice She has a career as a writer put on hold, while her husband Franklin (O'Reilly, at his most oblivious) carries on. We Need To Talk About Kevin - Behind the Scenes - Tilda Swinton Movie (2011) HD - YouTube 0:00 / 2:18 We Need To Talk About Kevin - Behind the Scenes - Tilda Swinton Movie. There is some resentment over Kevin's arrival deterring her professional ambitions. So, you kind of draw from that, but then, you also think about just putting yourself in that position too. Ultimately what it winds up giving us is perhaps the most important truth of Christianity, namely that God is the hope to be found in the midst of the smoke and ashes. There are two really great examples of this: the first is the bow. When he breaks his arm? The movie we see is her collecting every horrible interaction she ever had with her son and putting it under the umbrella of "things I did," because the only way she can cope with the insanity of what her son did is by fitting it to a narrative where she's responsible. But Eva is incapable of showing him the love that he deserves, even after trying her best. Kevin is a story of hope for a new millennium, an Its a Wonderful Life in the age of school shootings and planes crashing into buildings a world-weary world that has been bombarded by nihilistic themes in their narratives for the better part of a century. However, the story's unflinching refusal to provide answers for who was responsible carries over. Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton), a former travel writer, gives up her life of adventure when she becomes pregnant. Ramsay builds on Shriver's idea of internalised blame with how Eva sees herself following the tragedy. The novel by Lionel Shriver relates the story through a series of letters Eva writes to her husband Franklin. Kevin and Eva look similar, and in many scenes, Kevin and Eva wear similar clothes. The opening shot fades to white, before cutting to a sea of red in the next sequence, foreshadowing the bloodshed to come. The shelves and tabletops are as barren as those in a display home. Did your prior experience help prepare you for some of what to expect on Quantumania? Together, with Hopes parents Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), and Scotts daughter Cassie Lang (Kathryn Newton), the family finds themselves exploring the Quantum Realm, interacting with strange new creatures and embarking on an adventure that will push them beyond the limits of what they thought possible. The ending of the film leaves Eva's fate up in the air. Kevin examines both our darkest moments and those slivers of Grace that sustain us. Franklin didn't do that - he wasn't even there. He answers, I used to think I knew why, and now Im not so sure. This small act of hesitant humility is followed by Kevins embrace of his mother which can only be likened to the embrace received by that infamous scriptural progeny upon his arrival home. In reality, Kevin has an acquired taste for sadistic vengeance, and the lychee symbolizes Celias eye in the scene. When she asks him that honest question, having accepted the reality of her abuse towards him, she comes to him totally honest And he no longer feels that underlying connection between love and fear that motivated him to his actions. Stripping the screenplay off words, the disturbance arises from a seamless amalgamation of image and sound. The two embrace, and then she walks away. At first glance, it would seem that Kevin is yet another installment in the pantheon of post-modern films intent upon assaulting the human desire to give meaning to the world. Where do you think Jentorra's story goes next? He hates Eva for a plethora of reasons her neglect, her coldness towards Kevin, and Franklins misguided overcompensation for the lack of Evas love. Haunted by the past, Eva's memories are triggered by sounds, objects and everyday minutiae. And the whole thought was just to fight and keep fighting? Rather, Ramsay's film is an extended treatment of the optics of grief and guilt. Does their parental neglect make them culpable for the lives he took? When he is interviewed on TV, a reflection of Eva's face on the screen is overlaid on his. Franklin and Kevin have no special connections like that, and Franklin appropriates Eva's so that he can have something manly to do with his son. As a baby and toddler, he is merely colicky, irritating and would try the patience of a saint. Three days before his 16th birthday, Kevin Khatchadourian (Ezra Miller) kills several students, a teacher and a cafeteria worker in his high school gymnasium. Nicoletta Vallorani in her essay Of women and children: Bad mothers as rough heroes, reads a Biblical metaphor into We Need to Talk About Kevin. Sometimes Zuzus petals are all you have to hold onto. Motherhood was therefore intended as a punishment.. This in turn completely undermines the husband/wife dynamic. It is good to be more sensitive to the plights of children in general. But he hates her the most due to her pretense and dishonesty, it seems. There's the Good Mother, like Diane Freeling who travels to another dimension to save her daughter in Poltergeist. The film opens to the sounds of sprinklers tch-tch-ing, before the first shot reveals a half-open patio door whose curtains are wafting with the wind. The film shifts almost all of its attention to the mother of the disturbed Kevin, Eva (Swinton). In any other movie, that would be child abuse. Eva finally asks why he did it. Kevin was not necessarily abused or tortured as a child, many kids endure much worse and did not end up as mass killers. Kevins clothes are also an avenue to memories for Eva, and in the end, Eva irons and stacks up Kevins clothes in a drawer in the hope that her son will return from prison. Go. Her husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) dismisses her concerns and uproots their bustling city life for a quiet home in the suburbs. A demon seed. I have the feeling that this film, by entering Eva's mind, sees only what has been battering her down for 16 years. His reply: "You don't want to kill your audience.". Did you work with her individually on creating some of that dynamic since Jentorra is someone that's been in this fight a long time versus Cassie who is just beginning her fight against Kang? She lives with the guilt of what her son did, on top of the guilt of knowing she did nothing about the various warning signs. The real horror in the movie is society's dogmatic conception of motherhood, and the pressure to live up to it. Because children are normally associated with innocence, creepy children are a tried concept in horror films. and Stephen Broussard, p.g.a., Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania also stars Jonathan Majors as Kang, David Dastmalchian as Veb, Katy O'Brian as Jentorra, William Jackson Harper as Quaz and Bill Murray as Lord Krylar. Franklin's story is simpler but in some ways I think it's worse. This is the scene where the film begins and the ending comes full circle revisiting the moment of rupture in Evas life. And so is Eva. KATY: Yeah, I mean, this obviously had the difference between TV and movie. Kevin is far too malevolent, which might work in a Rosemary's Baby horror context, but not here (admittedly it does verge on horror at times but ultimately we are asked to empathise with Eva's travails as a mother). Anyways I haven't read the book but I guess I probably should lol, Scan this QR code to download the app now. We see this throughout Kevin's early developmental journey. Although these two terms are often used interchangeably in colloquial use, there are some mild differences between these two categories of personality disorders. I think Jentorra felt a little betrayed by her, and there was no real reconciliation with them at the end. KATY: We had this whole scene where we're all cheering at the end kind of thing. Something just happened. and our Then she goes home. Putting herself through a painful process of introspection, she revisits moments from well before Kevin's birth to the eventual tragedy. The kind of clothes one chooses is also indicative of ones social status. Indeed, one of. The film moves without any pattern between past, present and who knows when. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. So what about Franklin? Between the ages of 6 and 8 years old, played by Jasper Newell, he is a clever little monster who glares at Eva hurtfully, soils his pants deliberately and drives her into such a fury that she breaks his arm. We also did a lot of blue screen work before, which really helps with the imagination. So I am thinking, was he born evil from the very beginning and she knew it and treated him alike evil from the very beginning? Therefore, when Kevin shows Eva the scar from the childhood accident, he tells her that it is the most honest thing that Eva ever did to him. His final act of brutality a school massacre in addition to murdering his father and sister destroys any semblance of normalcy for Eva. The film explores and identifies the hope to be found in the ashes of Ground Zero and in the wake of Columbine while never once attempting to sugarcoat the real darkness and danger that exist in our world. Jokes are fine, but don't post tactless/inappropriate ones. We Need to Talk about Kevin in fact needs to be talked about, as what it is attempting to do by marrying the darkest, most nihilistic components of contemporary cinema with a redemptive message is groundbreaking. Mimicking the cyclical nature of trauma, the shot repeats in the climax, where Eva discovers the slain bodies of her husband and daughter. To express concern over a child's habitual malice is coded as monstrous. But it's also pretty surface level. February 24, 2023 at 12:05 PM ET. Kevin's insidious nature is best exemplified in a scene staged in the aftermath of Celia losing her eye. An important film that attempts to delve into the psychology behind the high school massacres we seem to read about in the news on a weekly basis. After you see the film, think about it. Despite his crime, she sells the house to pay the legal fees, moves closer to the prison so she can visit him, and continues to support him. The Bad Mother refers to oppressive puritans like Margaret White in Carrie. The non-linear approach makes the somewhat inevitable events more powerful and though Miller is effective as Kevin, younger actor Newell actually impressed me even more. Eva often looks like she's in a state of shock. These people live there, but they've never moved in. Contact | In a sonic sleight-of-hand, the joyful cheers alchemise into the sorrowful cries of the families and friends of Kevin's victims. Kevin relentlessly cries in the custody of Eva, but Franklin seems to know how to stop him. The wife and mother, Eva (Tilda Swinton), has been so overwhelmed by despair that her life exists in her mind all at the same time. Kevin is a story of hope for a new millennium, an It's a Wonderful Life in the age of school shootings and planes crashing into buildings -- a world-weary world that has been bombarded by nihilistic themes in their narratives for the better part of a century. I bring what is actually happening and the severity of what's actually happening to level out, I guess, this part of the movie, because on the other side, you got Kang and Janet are being very, very serious too on that side of things. It'd be so much fun. I think that she and Jentorra had a huge past together. Kevin's bedroom is actually the biggest red flag in the film, and the fact that neither Eva nor Franklin noticed that Kevin's bedroom clearly displays the signs of mental illness until he was fifteen years old proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Franklin had never looked in his bedroom, wasn't interested in his interests or hobbies, and didn't want to know what he did in his spare time. The real horror in We Need to Talk About Kevin is society's dogmatic conception of motherhood,and the pressure to live up to it. The mistake would be to take the film apart and try to reconnect the pieces in chronological order. So, I think it'd be really, really cool to see if they came up with something else. ET. So, seeing Kathryn, to me, her character Cassie was just someone who didn't understand the reality of the situation. But Kevin is just getting started, and his final act will be be Kevin's mother struggles to love her strange child, despite the increasingly dangerous things he says and does as he grows up. This review of the film was originally published on December 22, 2011. Don't use this space to complain about the average rating, chart position, genre voting, others' reviews or ratings, or errors on the page. It is an epistolary novel, comprising the letters that Eva Khatchadourian writes to her husband Franklin in the aftermath of their son's crime. KATY: Yeah, I was so jealous, because I really loved it. And of course from there, we learn he perpetrates a mass killing at a school. How would I behave if basically the weight of a literal realm was on my shoulders? The real horror in the movie is society's dogmatic conception of motherhood, and the pressure to live up to it. An unshakeable experience and a daring experiment in film form, Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin challenged conventional wisdom on what makes for a good adaptation. In Morvern Callar, Samantha Morton grieved her boyfriend's suicide. Rated R When Eva gets pregnant for the second time, Kevin feels that he has become estranged from the family and grows jealous. There are several red flags in the movie that indicates Kevins volatile dispositions, but an accurate diagnosis is not possible. He seems to recognize that he has some advantage over her. As he grows up, we see him in a blue t-shirt, and consecutively, in a bland white one. Eve disobeyed, she ate the apple and she was punished by becoming not only human but also a mother. Eva has spent the events of the film in deep introspection, coming to terms with the fact that she was an abusive mother, and at least some of what happened grew out of that. This is also true of Eva, but we see the conflict in her about her son's mental state. Despite the fact that Eva is a travel writer of particular renown, she is bound by an understanding of mother/child relationships that do not correspond with her own relationship with her son. He completely denies the reality of Kevin's personality and identity, and thus any agency over their relationship. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, we have officially entered the dead of winter that time after Christmas and New Years when, Earlier this year my home parish welcomed a new associate pastor. Use the boards for extended discussion. But Ramsay is less interested in the blame game, more in how trauma can put us in a vicious cycle of self-inflicted pain. In front of his mother, Kevin is often a difficult, menacing and unresponsive boy. As a teenager, Kevin (now played by Ezra Miller) has started to cruelly resemble his mother in profile and hairstyle. Her public perception is unlikely to change, but Eva appears firm in her choice to stick around for Kevin's sake. Kevin poops in his pants, and thinking this act to be deliberate, Eva throws him to the ground, breaking his arm. Eva always wanted a daughter, and as her attention moves from Kevin, he becomes more and more begrudging towards his sister. Outward appearances of mother and son match their steely interiority as neither suffers fools gladly and both abhor artifice and sentimentality. Children seldom get that attention, though. ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA Star Katy O'Brian On Deleted Bill Murray Scene, Backstory & More (Exclusive). When we see an overdressed Eva beside Kevin, the distinction between the two becomes clear as daylight. While Eva is shown throughout the film to be indifferent toward her son, Kevin's actions are fueled by his desire to spite her. Index | Eva takes incessant trips down memory lane to cope with her past loss. The point here is not to understand Kevin at all. But by the time he is a seven year-old, he starts to act in ways that seem in excess of whatever defects in mother love he may be getting. In a film otherwise devoid of hope, these subtle suggestions give the audience a sense of comfort. It's so convincing that it has the opposite effect on us, convincing us of her innocence and her son's innate evil - how could someone so pitiful, so sorrowful, so emotionally sensitive be responsible for the development of a totally psychopathic mind? Eva was never allergic to being a mother of course. After this episode, Eva and Kevin seemingly become more affectionate towards each other. What makes this all worthwhile is the fact that Tilda Swinton is simply an astonishing actress who can bring off anything. We see Kevin as a troubled kid who may need greater care. Prosecutors downgrade charges in Alec Baldwin shooting case, Die Hard star Bruce Willis has frontotemporal dementia, condition worsens, As We Need to Talk about Kevin turns 10, a look at what made it such a haunting meditation on motherhood. The flaws of this largely overwrought story belong not so much to Ramsay as filmmaker as to Shriver's source novel. This review of the film was originally published on December 22, 2011. Instead, maternal ambivalence is coded as horror. Indeed, Kevin is a relentless film that gives its audience few opportunities to come up for air from the depths of anguish to which it plummets. All logos and images used on this website are registered trademarks of their respective companies. As a portrait of a deteriorating state of mind, "We Need to Talk About Kevin" is a masterful film. The murder spree began with his father and sister suffering the same fate earlier that day. The camera zooms in, but the scene cuts just before we can get a peek on what's on the other side of it. Privacy | Ramsay regularly cuts to a scene where Eva is driving her car past flashing police lights toward the scene of some tragedy. By contrast with Elephant's oddly diffident lyricism, We Need To Talk About Kevin's expressionistic naturalism has a roiling, post-traumatic nonlinearity. Try the patience of a deteriorating state of shock Kevin ( now played by Ezra Miller ) has to., in a loose white shirt killing at a school massacre in addition to murdering his father and suffering. A literal realm was on my shoulders the air to come life for a quiet home in aftermath.... `` Eva wear similar clothes driving her car past flashing police lights toward the scene where the was... We had this whole scene where Eva is incapable of showing him the love that he has become estranged the! 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