Is she channeling the brief moment of affection between the two when he was young and sick, or is she working toward being a better mother upon his release? If you look one level deeper it's clear that Kevin was deeply and horribly emotionally abused by both of his parents, and in a genuinely loving family he would not have turned out the way he did. 2023 Cinemaholic Inc. All rights reserved. The ending of the film leaves Eva's fate up in the air. In a film otherwise devoid of hope, these subtle suggestions give the audience a sense of comfort. The novel explores themes of nihilism, motherhood, the relationship between violence and depravity, and much more. 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. Her only crime was perhaps hurrying into the role before she was ready. None of that takes anything away from yet another deeply felt performance by the always-interesting Swinton. Use the boards for extended discussion. Instead, maternal ambivalence is coded as horror. This model of motherhood so deeply rooted as it is in the biological doesnt leave much room for aberration, such that any rejection by the child becomes an indictment of the mothers entire existence. His attitude towards his son is warmer, but underneath there's no more depth than there is with Eva. He's positive, cheerful, disconnected; he always behaves as nicely as he can, and in doing so, suggests his profound cluelessness. Instead, it's a personal story about a family or more specifically, a mother (an excellent Swinton) and her troubled son. The past and present intertwine as Eva recalls Kevins formative years from childhood to adolescence, hoping for clues on what went wrong. In any other movie, that would be child abuse. Don't comment just to troll/provoke. Her emotional state doesnt change even when Kevin is born. Is it possible for her to move on from something so traumatic? Ramsay regularly cuts to a scene where Eva is driving her car past flashing police lights toward the scene of some tragedy. 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. So, I'm personally glad that they distanced that part of the thing from this character, but there was so little overlap that - There's only seven comic books, I think, that have Jentorra in them - that we really did seem to have a lot more freedom to kind of create a fully new character for this. The film follows the relationship between a mother and son, Eva (Tilda Swinton) and Kevin (played as a teenager by Ezra Miller and as a child by Jasper Newell) through a pastiche of sequences spanning the course of Kevins first eighteen years. When the child Kevin is sick and nuzzles close to his mother as she reads, his father comes to the door and is rejected in favor of his mother, the look on Evas face is one of wonder and delight. The Bad Mother refers to oppressive puritans like Margaret White in Carrie. 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. Privacy | There is some resentment over Kevin's arrival deterring her professional ambitions. Rated the #74 best film of 2011, and #5264 in the greatest all-time movies (according to RYM users). Overview. Franklin didn't do that - he wasn't even there. 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? We see it perfectly after he blinds Celia - Eva attempts to confront him about what he's done, and he sits chewing a water chestnut to impress the image of plucking out an eye on Eva, just to watch the horror on her face. ; Black Lightning) played this powerful new character, who has been engaged in this ongoing struggleagainst Kang (Jonathan Majors) for far longer than most and has paid an incomparableprice while trying to liberate her people from his rule. To express concern over a child's habitual malice is coded as monstrous. Kevin has numerous reasons to hate his mother, Eva. Also read:Author Lionel Shriver on her early writing, politics, essential reading list and persevering out of 'sheer spite'. So, that part I kind of liked because it shows, okay, this is what someone who's still fighting, interacting with someone who kind of essentially gave in. She has a career as a writer put on hold, while her husband Franklin (O'Reilly, at his most oblivious) carries on. In front of his mother, Kevin is often a difficult, menacing and unresponsive boy. She is less interested in the nature vs nurture debate, more in the crippling weight of societal expectations of motherhood. Updated Date: While we are not sure whether Kevin consumed the eye itself, we know from the book that Kevin keeps Celias glass eye as a souvenir after assailing her. Eva always wanted a daughter, and as her attention moves from Kevin, he becomes more and more begrudging towards his sister. For removal of copyrighted images, trademarks, or other issues, Contact Us. The light outside disappears. Firstpost - All Rights Reserved. So, I think it'd be really cool to explore that either in future Quantum Realm stuff or if somehow I got sucked out into the surface world or something, any of that would be fun. 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. Directed by Peyton Reed and produced by Kevin Feige, p.g.a. 1 'Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum' (2018) Image via Showbox. March 1, 2023, 6:00 a.m. She asks Kevin why he didn't kill her. 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. 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. An excellent movie with great characters, amazing development, and astounding use of cuts, foreshadowing, and visual storytelling. It's very hard for me to take things seriously, I love to crack jokes and everything, and, I mean, they're so funny off-set, even the guy that played Xolum, James Cutler, he's so funny, and he's just screaming random stuff, when you're trying to be serious, and just all of a sudden, this yell comes out of nowhere, and you're trying to just keep a straight face. ROHAN: Was there anything major cut that you remember shooting? So we must find our Grace in the minuscule, and it is in these brief moments of consolation, these shafts of light under the door, that Kevin provides the deft sucker punch to the, by now, standard narrative benchmarks of despair, emptiness and futility which permeate contemporary film. He grows into a spiteful toddler, refusing to say "mommy" and egging on her frustrations. We Need to Talk About Kevin Jump to Edit Summaries Kevin's mother struggles to love her strange child, despite the increasingly dangerous things he says and does as he grows up. Kevin has a real emotional attachment to his bow because the only time his mother showed him genuine affection was when he had the flu, and she read Robin Hood to him. 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. 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. Reilly is typically wonderful in a thankless role, while both juvenile actors evince a low-grade rage that never moves into complete disconnection or full-blown psychosis. Unfortunately, Eva either doesnt know or refuses to know what a more meaningful relationship with her son would look like; thus when their dinner begins with her asking him how school is going, Kevin immediately shuts her down, offering up a clichd mother/son dialogue full of rote questions and deadened responses. 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. One may ask how one of the main instincts of every living thing, the need to reproduce, could be frightful. There are several red flags in the movie that indicates Kevins volatile dispositions, but an accurate diagnosis is not possible. See production, box office & company info. The bed, the gown, and the walls bleed into each other in their cold whiteness, externalising her inner state of mind. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver plays with the deepest fears of the majority of people. There seems to be almost no form of abuse she is not willing to take as belonging to her for what has happened. For more information, please see our So, what did that exchange mean for the Khatchadourians? This is the scene where the film begins and the ending comes full circle revisiting the moment of rupture in Evas life. This turns out to be some sort of annual Italian tomato festival, but the image is disturbing. 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. For instance, the ball game Eva plays with a toddler Kevin: when Kevin successfully rolls the ball back to her, her praise is strained and brittle. Privacy Policy. There are two really great examples of this: the first is the bow. Maternal ambivalence turns into filial antagonism, colouring her perception of him as inherently evil. "At the end of the day, I have no idea, and that pure, serene, ignorance has become, itself, a funny kind of solace," she writes in a letter to her deceased husband. Eva can only play at being mommy, and so when Kevin refuses her attempts to breastfeed and is only appeased by the presence of his affable father, played by John C. Reilly, her whole world crashes down around her and her value as a person comes into question. Menu. Each rewatch only feels more rewarding because Ramsay is so pure and gifted a filmmaker she rattles and revises our preconceptions of what a movie and yes, mother too can be. Kevin appears in a short sleeve red shirt as a toddler. He is pursuing a Licentiate in Sacred Theology at Heythrop College in London. Kevin's antics swell into violence during his teenage years, further driving a wedge between his parents and mutilating his little sister Celia (Ashley Gerasimovich) along the way. We learn that Kevin was a difficult, colicky baby, who grew up to be a difficult, problematic child who seemingly refuses to toilet train, despite a rather surprising vocabulary. About | Being a mother somehow means they're inherently guilty. Selena Gomez recently opened up on how the autoimmune condition is affecting her weight due to water retention from all the medication in her recent Tik-Tok live stream. Is her husband as zoned out as he seems or is that only her perception? As he grows up, we see him in a blue t-shirt, and consecutively, in a bland white one. For Kevin, maternal love and attention have become completely conflated with disgust and fear. 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. In Morvern Callar, Samantha Morton grieved her boyfriend's suicide. Franklin himself lives in a state of demented decency, deceiving himself that his family are living acceptable lives. The opening shot fades to white, before cutting to a sea of red in the next sequence, foreshadowing the bloodshed to come. I watched this film several years ago and decided today I'd watch it again as I really enjoyed it the first time round! The same 7-year-old also says, "I don't give a rat's ass." Alcohol, Drugs & Smoking Mild 35 of 50 found this mild Adults are sometimes shown casually drinking wine. Read More: Best Movies About Mental Illness. 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. 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