We Need To Talk About Kevin rarely lets loose on your discomfort as it follows the traumatized, horrified, and guilt-ridden state of a broken woman who has lost everything and relives the disturbing memories of what brought her to this. The film jumps back and forth through time frames, giving cryptic clues and symbolism of the disturbing events that occurred and how it brings out the most stunted and traumatizing expressions through Tilda Swinton’s incredible performance as the broken mother Eva.
Throughout the film, symbolism of Eva’s broken self and the disturbed son Kevin that she raised powerlessly is shown through shades of red, from the paint defaced on her white house to the jelly her son smears on his sandwich. The opening scene is a dreamy sequence of Eva being carried joyfully through a crowd covered in tomato juice, as a symbolism of being bathed in blood without knowing it’s blood and foreshadows how her ignorance and incompetence as a mother had disturbing setbacks for her and her family. She was powerless and inexperienced as a mothering type to prevent would happen and raised her son with a stillness and an impatience from infancy to adolescence, receiving cold and resentful eyes from Kevin, which suits the comparison to her emotionless and stunted relationship with him. The optimistic and loving nature of her husband Franklyn (John C. Reilly) towards Kevin leaves her feeling out of place with her son’s development and makes the development of the boy a very eccentric and frightening experience on screen. The minimalist look of the pale white, red, and blue colors that fill Eva’s surroundings in her home and work environment shows how emotionally absent she is as a happy and responsible woman. Whenever the film cuts to the present time, we see just how equally cold the people around her behave, as they eye at her with judgment and silence and sometimes intimidate her with words and force. The scene where she drives home at night past the hordes of trick-or-treaters with their masks looking at her brings the sense of being terrorized by juvenile play on the basis of how frightening her son behaved and of living in hellish damnation for her own faults as a mother. The scenes of blackness and red lights shining through her windows as she lays in isolation shows what a lonely and nightmarish reality she has come to live in. She is already living in Hell and she even admits to two Jehovah’s Witnesses that she’s going to Hell in the afterlife. The close-ups of washing her hands of red paint and sticking her head in bathtub water symbolizes the need of washing herself of her sins, which is also juxtaposed with the horrible deeds that Kevin committed and made him into a demonic reflection on her.
The twisted and maniacal expressions in Kevin’s eyes that are frighteningly conveyed by Ezra Miller and the cold domineering manner in which he talks to his mother makes him altogether a devilish figure who is confronting her on her failings of motherhood and the prediction of the misery she will be forced to live with. The ultimate evil deed he committed to bring his disturbed personality to the extreme is never officially revealed through the constant juxtapositions between the past and the present, which is helpful in building on the broken mind-set of Eva as she dreads remembering what happened, especially when she visits Kevin in prison and we still see a communication gap between them as they sit in the visiting room with silence. She is confronting the boy who conveyed her failure at parenting through his extreme acts of violence and perversion, which is a way of confronting the Devil and trying to admit her sins. When it’s finally revealed as to what Kevin did in the end that put him in prison, it apparently lifts a burden off her shoulders and she wants to make a reconciliation that will somehow brings her to peace.
What the future holds in store for Eva and Kevin is not clear, but the honesty of the emptiness they have conveyed throughout their lives becomes a cry for redemption and we can only hope that the mind will be put to rest with the confession of past mistakes and regrets. The film remains subtle and thought-provoking throughout its time to leave a disturbing window open for emotional trauma and psychological discussion, with no clear answer in sight of how different things could have turned out by Eva’s making or Kevin’s making. When it’s called We Need To Talk About Kevin, there’s something that needs to be talked about.
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