Talk of Escaping: “We Need to Talk About Kevin”

Red is everywhere in We Need to Talk About Kevin: it colors frames, splatters windows, cakes in hair. It slips and sticks and oozes. It covers over.

The color is important because, to an injudicious or less sympathetic viewer, it appears that Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton) is losing her mind. And well should she, living alone in a squat house by a road surrounded by neighbors who grimace at her in passing, down the street from a job that she barely survives, dodging catcalls from children and angry verbal — and physical — assaults from townspersons.

How did Eva get here? What did she do to deserve this? What has gone so terribly, awfully wrong?

It’s neither the question nor the answer that really fascinates director and co-writer Lynne Ramsay, adapting Lionel Shriver’s chilly epistolary novel. Instead, Ramsay is after something more slippery and, as a result, more unsatisfying.

The conventions are all there in the script, stark as thin daggers of meaning, jutting out to cut passing characters. But the film doesn’t pursue them, not quite. Euro-chic mother raises demonic spawn child (that’d be Kevin) to be a sociopathic slaughterer. Child is imprisoned. Mother suffers.

Child suffers.

The loop repeats, suffocating those within it — and us, the audience. Because what Ramsay is after is that, there, the mood of endless unending repetitious hell. That outletless guilt. That impotent remorse. That ness.

This is where the red helps, as a manifestation of Eva’s own psychic prejudices — her son’s room is surrounded by walls of navy — and of Swinton’s endlessly diligent method performance as a manfiestor of those manifestations.

It’s to Ramsay’s credit that Swinton is successful, partially, amid the half-hidden truths and that what is frenetic is also penetrating. Partially.

But it isn’t to Ramsay’s credit that she has made the sweeping, auteurist gesture of turning Shriver’s novel inside-out, so that we look at Eva instead of with her. That novel, structured as a series of letters, was drenched in language. On screen, We Need to Talk About Kevin is drenched in red.

The words say more.