Motherhood was therefore intended as a punishment.. However, just the neglect of his mother would not amount to the cathartic finale. Kevin grows up to be ever more distant. Rather, Ramsay's film is an extended treatment of the optics of grief and guilt. A lawsuit could force the F.D.A. Ramsay builds on Shriver's idea of internalised blame with how Eva sees herself following the tragedy. We see Kevin as a troubled kid who may need greater care. Or did Kevin turned this way because she messed him up from the very birth. KATY: I kind of saw Jentorra as someone who was already part of a warrior society, so maybe she was used to fighting already, but in kind of a way different level. We had a lot more time to prepare for the character, had a lot more time to delve into the script and the role wasn't just like, you know, here's four pages, learn it by tonight, you know? We're supposed to understand Kevin through Eva's flashbacks, which are indeed confusing, but not chronologically, where the difference lies solely in Tilda Swinton's hairstyle. Apparently even before he began to talk, Kevin made a vow to punish Eva for her feelings. The comedy had to come elsewhere there. Kevin abused his mother because she developed a relationship with him where he could have honest interactions with her if he did. So, seeing Kathryn, to me, her character Cassie was just someone who didn't understand the reality of the situation. See production, box office & company info. At first glance, it would seem that Kevin is yet another installment in the pantheon of post-modern films intent upon assaulting the human desire to give meaning to the world. So, his dressing sense is perhaps not an indictment of his bitterness. I think that she and Jentorra had a huge past together. February 24, 2023 at 12:05 PM ET. Cookies help us deliver our Services. But Kevin is just getting started, and his final act will be beyond anything anyone imagined. For full Oscars coverage and commentary by its reviewer, Fr. Stripping the screenplay off words, the disturbance arises from a seamless amalgamation of image and sound. She created a relationship which encouraged him to act out as horribly as possible to get the most honest reactions from her, because she only ever showed him her real emotions when she was disgusted. An early scene shows Eva apparently participating in an orgy in a lake of blood. The result is that Franklin completely deprives Kevin of proper care - not only mental healthcare, but any other kind of care. Hosted by Michael Barbaro and Sabrina . Shortly after, Eva goes back to the house. As a teenager, Kevin (now played by Ezra Miller) has started to cruelly resemble his mother in profile and hairstyle. She is the wrong person in the wrong life with the wrong child. Kevin is seen at three ages. It's no secret that We Need to Talk about Kevin is intended to challenge your assumptions about the people we think of as "evil." Be respectful! Kevin and Eva look similar, and in many scenes, Kevin and Eva wear similar clothes. Kevin's mother struggles to love her strange child, despite the increasingly dangerous things he says and does as he grows up. We Need to Talk About Kevin. Instead, it's a personal story about a family or more specifically, a mother (an excellent Swinton) and her troubled son. Kevin eats the lychee with a degree of grossness, and when his mother says that he never liked lychee as a fruit, Kevin has to say that it is an acquired taste. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, we have officially entered the dead of winter that time after Christmas and New Years when, Earlier this year my home parish welcomed a new associate pastor. He completely denies the reality of Kevin's personality and identity, and thus any agency over their relationship. Kevin keeps the secret of how this happens and a strange complicity develops between the mother and son. Eva and Franklin never seek psychiatric help for their son; they can't talk about Kevin without fighting. The film loops in time, proceeding mostly chronologically, with some dips forward and backward. Kevin's killings, meanwhile, are the absent, invisible center of Ramsay's film. The film does not show us how Kevin presents the eyeball to Eva in jail. Some of the content presented on our sites has been provided by fans, other unofficial websites or online news sources, and is the sole responsibility of the source from which it was obtained. The victims of those who go out with a bang are miniscule in comparison to the number who go out (extinguish themselves) in solitude with nary a whimper. So, what did that exchange mean for the Khatchadourians? Watch Indie Spirit Stars Suggest Indie Gems You Must Watch Right Now. Tilda Swinton, in a bracing, tour-de-force performance,. Starring Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly Swinton told me of a line in the script that wasn't used, wisely, I believe. Now I'm not so sure." Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. Near the top of the list of the worst movies to watch on Mother's Day is "We Need to Talk About Kevin." Kevin is a defiant baby who screams incessantly but never around Franklin. Being a child somehow means they're inherently innocent. The story revolves around a family of four, but the main focus is on the relationship between the mother (Eva, played by Tilda Swinton) and the son (Kevin, played by Rock River, Jasper Newell and Ezra Miller). Three days before turning 16, Kevin unleashes chaos in his school. A flashback, from long before Kevin was born, shows Eva at La Tomatina, celebrating with the crowd. For full Oscars coverage and commentary by its reviewer, Fr. Kevin's insidious nature is best exemplified in a scene staged in the aftermath of Celia losing her eye. Any spoilers should be placed in spoiler tags as such. In a film otherwise devoid of hope, these subtle suggestions give the audience a sense of comfort. Then she goes home. Also read:Author Lionel Shriver on her early writing, politics, essential reading list and persevering out of 'sheer spite'. Therefore, when Kevin shows Eva the scar from the childhood accident, he tells her that it is the most honest thing that Eva ever did to him. So, I think it'd be really, really cool to see if they came up with something else. That's a deeply human tale, and it calls to us, and I think that's why I see takes on the movie saying that it even encourages the viewer to think evil is in our nature and is immutable. That the film works so brilliantly is a tribute in large part to the actors. But when he just sits there frowning, she expresses real disgust towards him. So, me, I'm surrounded by comedy, and I have to bring the reality of what's going on. In We Need to Talk about Kevin, Eva is literally on trial for parental negligence. It's hard not to see some of Eva's frustration at her changed lifethey leave the city and she is left with most of the child careas manifesting in a kind of resentment of Kevin. Matters worsen when she becomes pregnant with a daughter. It is a world where any attempts to offer a message of mercy, conversion and redemption must be done deftly and authentically, because at the end of the day, sometimes the community won't rally around you and more often than not Mr. Potter carries the day. Selena Gomez recently opened up on how the autoimmune condition is affecting her weight due to water retention from all the medication in her recent Tik-Tok live stream. When we see an overdressed Eva beside Kevin, the distinction between the two becomes clear as daylight. SPOILERS AHEAD. Children seldom get that attention, though. One may ask how one of the main instincts of every living thing, the need to reproduce, could be frightful. Or maybe I'm somehow getting it mixed up with another film! In reality, Kevin has an acquired taste for sadistic vengeance, and the lychee symbolizes Celias eye in the scene. When Eva dips her whole face in a basin of water, her face turns into Kevin's. But by the time he is a seven year-old, he starts to act in ways that seem in excess of whatever defects in mother love he may be getting. Don't get in arguments with people here, or start long discussions. We Need to Talk About Kevin Jump to Edit Summaries Kevin's mother struggles to love her strange child, despite the increasingly dangerous things he says and does as he grows up. ", As with any book-to-film adaptation, some of the nuances were lost in translation. Psychology Today describes the "nature vs. nurture" debate as questioning how both elements impact a person's characteristics. Her husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) dismisses her concerns and uproots their bustling city life for a quiet home in the suburbs. The film moves without any pattern between past, present and who knows when. A demon seed. They never talk about Kevin. When he is interviewed on TV, a reflection of Eva's face on the screen is overlaid on his. Through association and contextualization, it becomes evident that Kevin killed his father and sister with the new and powerful bow and arrow that he received as a Christmas present from his father. The red paint of vandals stains her car and the front of her house. "At the end of the day, I have no idea, and that pure, serene, ignorance has become, itself, a funny kind of solace," she writes in a letter to her deceased husband. It was definitely a challenge to play the straight character to these guys, but it was also kind of like, okay, this is my role. The most plausible answer is that Kevin killed the family to hurt his mother. Will she continue living in their hometown, where she's harassed by locals who blame her for the deaths? In Maternal Horror Film: Melodrama and Motherhood, Sarah Arnold identifies how mothers as characters suffer from a Manichean oversimplification, or as she calls it the unstable ideology of idealised motherhood. Kevin relentlessly cries in the custody of Eva, but Franklin seems to know how to stop him. We cling to guidelines like the length of Tilda Swinton's hair to figure out where we are. Or to put it differently, Ramsay more or less stays true to the novel's somewhat callow and, at times, hysterical approach to the rich questions of maternal doubt. Kevin, it seems, is a volatile Holden Caulfield for the generation. However, the story's unflinching refusal to provide answers for who was responsible carries over. The second is Kevin's bedroom. The film depicts him as a psychopath beyond redemption. BBC Films He grows into a spiteful toddler, refusing to say "mommy" and egging on her frustrations. I'd be happy to see what they come up with, but, they have more of the understanding of the wildness of the world that they're building. Copyright 2023. The point here is not to understand Kevin at all. This is the fear of parenthood. One day, Celia loses one of her eyes from toxic cleaning supplies, and Kevin becomes a prime suspect. Eva can only play at being mommy, and so when Kevin refuses her attempts to breastfeed and is only appeased by the presence of his affable father, played by John C. Reilly, her whole world crashes down around her and her value as a person comes into question. From ths beginning of the movie they lay out the whole story, but it isn't until you watch the full thing that you piece everything together and get this larger than life story. GameStop Moderna Pfizer Johnson & Johnson AstraZeneca Walgreens Best Buy Novavax SpaceX Tesla. Did your prior experience help prepare you for some of what to expect on Quantumania? So, I'm personally glad that they distanced that part of the thing from this character, but there was so little overlap that - There's only seven comic books, I think, that have Jentorra in them - that we really did seem to have a lot more freedom to kind of create a fully new character for this. This is not entirely his fault. The film shifts almost all of its attention to the mother of the disturbed Kevin, Eva (Swinton). It was a really short moment, and then yeah, I would have loved to have had some interaction with Janet, but that wasn't even in there. Overview. The sound of him savouring the juicy fruit a fruit he doesn't even like in deliberate crunches of sinister delight becomes unsettling when paired with the thought of Celia's lost eye. By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. The two embrace, and then she walks away. Kevin's mother struggles to love her strange child, despite the increasingly dangerous things he says and does as he grows up. Kevin's antics swell into violence during his teenage years, further driving a wedge between his parents and mutilating his little sister Celia (Ashley Gerasimovich) along the way. To rate, slide your finger across the stars from left to right. Eva finally asks why he did it. There's the Good Mother, like Diane Freeling who travels to another dimension to save her daughter in Poltergeist. Kevin poops in his pants, and thinking this act to be deliberate, Eva throws him to the ground, breaking his arm. Sign up for weekly updates from Busted Halo! KATY: Oh, I'd love to come back. We Need to Talk About Kevin is already playing in NYC; it opens today in LA, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix and is rolling out nationwide. As Robin Hood, little Kevin appears in a similar-looking shirt. We Need to Talk About Kevin : r/books. Footsteps approach the tent and a figure walks past. Following the release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, we caught up with actress Katy O'Brian to talk about her MCU debut as Jentorra, deleted scenes with Bill Murray, and a whole lot more! So, I think it'd be really cool to explore that either in future Quantum Realm stuff or if somehow I got sucked out into the surface world or something, any of that would be fun. Directed by Peyton Reed and produced by Kevin Feige, p.g.a. Finally. As a portrait of a deteriorating state of mind, "We Need to Talk About Kevin" is a masterful film. While Eva is shown throughout the film to be indifferent toward her son, Kevin's actions are fueled by his desire to spite her. We see her birthing of him as rather fraught and his incessant crying drives her nearly mad. He buys a few locks before the school sabotage and has a decisive plan regarding how to go about it. When the child Kevin is sick and nuzzles close to his mother as she reads, his father comes to the door and is rejected in favor of his mother, the look on Evas face is one of wonder and delight. For Kevin, maternal love and attention have become completely conflated with disgust and fear. The film moves without any pattern between past, present and who knows when. All of the performances are secondary to an urgently compelling narrative that is both agonizing to witness and impossible to look away from. ROHAN: You have a few scenes with Kathryn Newton, who is playing Cassie, in the film. Maybe everything else is intended to be a flashback, and the timeline begins when she finds out what Kevin did at his high school. Is it possible for her to move on from something so traumatic? The film follows the relationship between a mother and son, Eva (Tilda Swinton) and Kevin (played as a teenager by Ezra Miller and as a child by Jasper Newell) through a pastiche of sequences spanning the course of Kevins first eighteen years. Jokes are fine, but don't post tactless/inappropriate ones. It is so ingrained in our culture even a fellow grieving mother slaps her in the parking lot. Fr. KATY: Yeah, I mean, this obviously had the difference between TV and movie. Starring: Tilda Swinton,John C. Reilly,Ezra Miller Watch all you want. Her body can't absorb more punishment. The condition causes loss of the ability to understand or express speech. Try refreshing this page.If the problem persists, contact our support contact our support Theres a possibility that maybe before all this happened that there was that naivete to Jentorra, but yeah, I don't know that she was re-inspired by Cassies energy, I guess, as much as like, Hey, this is the real world and you need to kind of catch up to where we are.. Ironically he becomes a miniature doppelganger of her, all sharp angles and androgynous countenance lying in direct contrast to the lovably rounded and craggy features of his father. When Kevin paints Evas room with color splashes, Eva thinks that Kevin wanted to ruin the room, but maybe he really wanted to make it more special. Kevin replies that he thought he knew why but now hes not sure anymore. It is an epistolary novel, comprising the letters that Eva Khatchadourian writes to her husband Franklin in the aftermath of their son's crime. 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