We Need To Talk About Kevin (15)

The unsettling climax of We Need to Talk about Kevin takes place in a Connecticut high school. It’s here, after a boyhood marked by shocking cruelty, that teenager Kevin goes on a violent rampage, leaving many people dead and his mother Eva (Tilda Swinton) struggling to come to terms with her son’s murderous impulses.

Was she in some way responsible? And can she still continue to love him despite this monstrous act? Whatever else, Eva can’t have imagined the innocent baby she bore would have turned out this way.

‘Expect Great Things’ reads a mural in one of the high school corridors down which Kevin stalks, and that passing detail seems to mock all the hopes and dreams that Eva and her husband Franklin (John C Reilly) held for Kevin as a baby.

It’s a troubling, ambitious premise for a film and Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel disappoints. Spanning a timeframe of around two decades, We Need to Talk about Kevin offers an impressionistic portrait of Eva: the carefree days at the start of her relationship with Franklin, her struggles as a mother of the disruptive baby Kevin and her increasing difficulties with the surly, nasty little boy he grows into. Framing these flashbacks, we see Eva reeling from the massacre her son committed, suffering the barely disguised hostility of the families of his victims.

That’s a lot to cover, and Ramsay’s scattershot approach is frustrating. Jumping back and forth in time, we’re given fragments of Eva and Kevin’s relationship, but the film never pauses long enough to resonate emotionally. The effect is like flicking through the photo album of a dysfunctional family. It doesn’t help that the seeds of Kevin’s outrage are planted so obviously: from a toddler onwards he’s a one-note brat and at times has the eerie malevolence of Damien from The Omen. Given the complex aspirations of the film, you’d expect a more rounded characterisation than that of a 1970s horror.

The real shame about this misfire is that it promised so much. Shriver’s original novel is rightly acclaimed, and Ramsay has memorably explored some of the dark aspects of childhood in her short films and her wonderful feature-length debut Ratcatcher. She’s one of Britain’s finest directors, and you can see flickering evidence of this here. But we’ll have to wait for the next film until she’s back on form. Expect great things – I still do.