We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011)

The high school students who take the film class I teach tend to love horror movies, and most semesters, we'll engage in a debate over the merits of the genre. I'll show them "Psycho," which they don't find particularly scary, and then I'll show them "The Shining," which tends to register as a lot more freaky to many of the kids.

Once I taught "The Exorcist." Once. I terrified me watching it again and the religious connections made me too uncomfortable, so I shelved it from my list of teaching titles.

But the debate I have with students often centers around the very definition of what horror is. I don't think a great horror film even needs to be a film within the horror genre, much less a torture-port flick or a traditional jump-from-behind-a-tree-with-a-knife kind of film.

So although I have yet to see any 2011 releases that were specifically labeled as horror, I'm going to tell you what the best horror film of 2011 is: "We Need To Talk About Kevin."

Perhaps it's because I'm a parent. Or a teacher. Likely, it's the combination of both. And, as with any good horror film, it's in the performance of the "bad guy." Here, that guy is Kevin, played in his teenage years with chilling menace by Ezra Miller. Miller's every glance terrified me. And what he did terrified me further.

Based on a novel of the same name, "We Need To Talk About Kevin" is really the story of the boy's mother, Eva, played here by Tilda Swinton in what I think is the most accomplished and affecting performance of her career thus far. The film, directed by Lynne Ramsay, shifts in time throught Kevin's life up to and after he executes a brutal, Columbine-style massacre on unsuspecting students in his high school. One of the film's primary angles is to focus on Eva and what her life is like as the mother of a child who could do such a thing.

Of course one of the great techniques of horror is to let the audience in on the secret all along but then have them second-guess that what is to happen will actually happen, or at least keep them from understanding just how and when it will happen. Ramsay does this. We know right away what Kevin did by virtue of the way the film is edited. But we don't know how. Or any details. And most shockingly, we miss the clues along the way just as Kevin's parents do.

How could this happen? That's the film's central question. And at first, we feel like we have it all figured out. Kevin, it turns out, is a terrible child. He doesn't listen. He is angry and spiteful from an early age. In one particular scene of rage-inducing parental frustration, Eva is trying to get Kevin to count and add using a book. Kevin knowingly defies his mother with a manufactured progression of numbers and answers we know he knows is wrong. And he does so with malice. Kevin seems to be, from early on in the film, Rosemary's Baby.

Still, we sympathize with Eva and her passive husband, Franklin (John C. Reilly), whom film critic Brad Brevet calls the film's weak link because the screenplay employs the tired "boys will be boys" cliche regarding the dad's impression of his son. I'm inclined to agree with Brevet's analysis, though the father's naivite is central to the plot development. Without giving away too much, some of the "boy things" that Franklin and Kevin engage in together explain why Kevin grows to be kinder to his father than to his mother. It turns out that his father is accidentally and unknowingly preparing Kevin to be able to carry out his plan.

I don't want to say more about that, or how the story unfolds. I will say that before the end, I literally yelled out loud on at least one occassion as was terrified more than once. Certainly, "We Need To Talk About Kevin" depicts every parent's worst nightmare. What if you try as hard as you can to raise your child and he turns out like this? How can you live with yourself? How can you live where you live? It's an unthinkable tragedy, and when you watch it, you want to feel like it was an avoidable one but when you go back through the story, you get discouraged. What could Eva have done differently? What would I have done? Would any of it have mattered?

As I mentioned, Swinton is fantastic here. In one powerful scene, Eva physically lashes out against a bratty young Kevin, throwing him against the wall after a disgusting act of defiance on his part. Any parent would have wanted to react the same, whether or not we'd have actually followed through on it. Her split-second and thoughtless response to Kevin lands them in the emergency room. Now this is Eva's fault. And Swinton effortlessly communicates the self-disappointment, exhaustion and despair of a mother at the end of her rope.

"We Need To Talk About Kevin" is artistically shot and edited. The sound is fantastic, as sound must be in any good horror film. The build-up to the inevitable plot conclusion is harrowing and tensely unavoidable. Sympathy, terror, anger and despair swirl together, ducking in and out of the film and often coexisting in its frames. It is one of those movies that stuck to my ribs for hours after. I couldn't shake it or get it out of my head.

Don't be fooled by the "drama" label. "We Need To Talk About Kevin" is a terrifying and deeply psychological horror story, steeped in the reality and precedent of recent (and ongoing) national tragedies. But it's not a movie about Columbine. Or Virginia Tech. Or Northern Illinois. It's a movie about the part of all of those stories that we've never heard told...the one about the parents of the killer.

3.5 out of 4