We Need To Talk About Kevin

Director: Lynne Ramsay
Starring: Tilda Swinton, John C Reilly, Ezra Miller
Time Out rating:
Japanese title: Shonen wa Zankokuna Yumi wo Iru

Pretty much the only comforting thing about fierce Tilda Swinton is the way she reliably produces a miracle – of the spiky, androgynous kind – every time out. Call it a sign of her own self-awareness, then, that she's eased into maternal roles only to undermine them: her inspired turn in 2008's Julia is now eclipsed by her knockout work as a black-mop-topped suburbanite desperately alone with her squalling infant. Eva (Swinton) palpably hates her life, resents her chubby hubby (John C Reilly) and wheels her baby carriage next to a rattling jackhammer just to drown out the nonstop wails. The sourness is so unlike anything coming out of Hollywood (forget about momcentric TV), it takes your breath away.

Like the 2003 Lionel Shriver novel it's based upon, the brooding, elliptical We Need to Talk About Kevin contains a nightmarish plot point that it barely bothers to conceal: let's just say that we also get to know a visibly ravaged Eva, slightly older, alone and the target of withering abuse from her community. Guilt has replaced the burn, and the brilliantly acute Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay (Morvern Callar) fills the frame with splashes of red paint and tomato-soup cans. Her baby grows into an intractable brat (Jasper Newell), then an ominous, calculating teen (Ezra Miller) who might be a projection of his mother's dark cloud. The movie toggles between two periods – before and after a catastrophe – and, were it not for Swinton's magnetism, it would be unbearable. Instead, you'll want to stay for the wallop.

We Need To Talk About Kevin opens at Toho Cinemas Chanter, Hibiya on June 30