And just like the book, the pic saves its cruelest revelation for last, in a reveal even the most genre-trained auds might not see coming. The finer details are meted out in small, cruel shocks (gore is minimal, but the telling details are no less disturbing). The scene and others like it neatly establish the story’s unanswerable core conundrum: Is Kevin just a bad seed, or did Eva’s strained, unhappy first attempt at parenting turn him into a monster?Īs in the book, it’s revealed fairly early on that at some point Kevin did something horrible and deadly at his high school that created a small avenging army of grieving parents, whom a now-alone Eva must constantly dodge and withstand abuse from in the film’s present tense. At one point, she tells her toddler son while he’s angrily splattering the walls with baby food that, quite frankly, she’d rather be in Paris than sitting with him at that moment, an honest reaction many mothers feel but don’t usually dare articulate. Reilly) awkwardly swap a boho hipster lifestyle in Gotham for upmarket suburbia to make a home for their son, Kevin (played as a toddler by Rocky Duer, as a 6- to 8-year-old by Jasper Newell, and finally, chillingly as a teen by Ezra Miller), and later his sister, Celia (Ashley Gerasimovich).Īlthough Eva and Franklin intentionally conceive Kevin out of love for each other, motherhood doesn’t come easily to this adventurous, fiercely independent, some might say selfish woman, especially when faced with an angry, colicky baby. Told chronologically, the story relates how travel-writer-turned-publisher Eva Khatchadourian (Swinton) and her photographer husband Franklin (John C. Pic unspools through a fluid system of flashbacks that require auds to pay close attention to the length of Swinton’s hair to know what’s happening when. To echo a key line Kevin speaks at one point, the look and tone of the film isn’t something that has to be understood in context it is the context.
Here, as in her previous work, especially her 1999 feature debut, “Ratcatcher,” trained photographer Ramsay lets pure film technique do the heavy lifting in order to convey the desolate emotional climate that makes the central tragedy happen.
But as she proved with her 2002 sophomore effort, “Morvern Callar,” Ramsay has no qualms about shearing great chunks of exposition from the texts she works with to get to the heart of the story. On paper, Shriver’s distinctively voiced, Stateside-set first-person narrative might have seemed like a mismatch for Ramsay’s visually stylized, European-arthouse sensibility.
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