Bad Objects: We Need to Talk About Kevin

Bad Objects is a series chronicling films with cursed productions, controversial content, disastrous releases, polarizing legacies, and sometimes all of the above.

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On December 14th, 2012 a gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary and murdered twenty-six people. I was seven years old, it was the first time I had ever heard of a school shooting. My parents explained it the best they could, but I don’t think I truly understood what I was being told. What I mainly retained from our conversation was what best practices were in the event of a shooting at my school, and what I could do to maximize my chances of survival. It was very similar to a conversation about the possibility of a fire or an earthquake or a tornado. What I didn’t grasp at the time was that this act was perpetrated by a human being not some sort of cataclysmic force. I couldn’t comprehend why a person would do such a thing so I didn’t, I lumped it in with a different kind of tragedy, a kind caused by forces of nature and not human beings.

A year earlier on December 9th, 2011, We Need to Talk About Kevin was released in the United States. Based on Lionel Schriver's 2003 novel of the same name, Lynne Ramsey's film while somewhat niche, instantly made waves. I was six years old, so I did not read Roger Ebert’s four-star review nor did I hear Mark Kermode name it the best film of 2011. I don’t know exactly when I first heard about the film, but I do know that my first encounters with it were on YouTube, a movie that would appear on lists of the most “disturbing” films. We Need to Talk About Kevin had a reputation among film critics as being the kind of great but challenging film Lynne Ramsey is so good at making. But with more general audiences it took on an almost urban legend-like status, something that came out of nowhere and hit a nerve that deeply unsettled people.

I remember once in high school a student made a threatening SnapChat post alluding to committing a school shooting. The police were called they concluded the threat was baseless and continued to monitor the situation, but despite the assurance of safety, the school was still half empty the next day. I was never particularly concerned for my safety day, but it was an eerie experience, seeing how much power even a totally neutered threat of that nature had. School shootings were not something that went unmentioned at my high school, there were drills to prepare for them, teachers would talk to the class about them, and students would make jokes about them. They were present but they weren’t real, they weren’t something anybody ever expected to actually experience, but when the idea of a school shooting became even slightly tangible people panicked. I didn’t see We Need to Talk About Kevin, until college and I’m glad that I didn’t because I think experiences color We Need to Talk About Kevin into something more than an urban legend, but into a film that speaks to something real.

What is particularly effective about We Need to Talk About Kevin, is how little explores the central massacre of the film. It’s present certainly, we see flashes of it, we’re given the fragments to understand how it happened, but it’s just that, flashes and fragments, nothing more. The choice to explore it in that way is very effective, and to an extent, it’s the approach of the entire film. Ramsey doesn’t give any clear answers in the film, she explores things, she presents ideas, but she’s careful not to get too overly into details, she carefully balances this as something representative of a wider scale issue and a specific story regarding a particular family. It provides insight into why a person may turn to such an extreme act of violence but it doesn’t confirm why.

This is perhaps best represented in the film's exploration of the “nature vs nurture” debate. Kevin (Ezra Miller) certainly seems like something of a bad seed from the moment he’s born, he’s a difficult baby and a petulant toddler. At the same time, his mother Eva (Tilda Swinton) seems immediately resentful of her son, and her attempts to express love for him are always clearly superficial. Is Kevin, such a broken individual because of the way his mother raised him, or does she have disdain for her son because he was in fact “born bad”, or is it somewhere in the middle? The film never answers, but leaves you with the ability to walk away with any conclusion, because they are all possible.

Every aspect of the film works towards that mystery, from Ramsey's brilliant approach to structure to Swinton and Millers' performances. Swinton plays Eva in such a way where it can be hard to tell if she hates her son or she’s just having a hard time raising a difficult child, and Miller’s performance leaves it unclear if Kevin is truly a totallyemotionless sociopath, or instead if they’re someone whose been broken by their childhood and does not have the tools to cope with that. Eva is clearly not a good parent, and Kevin is clearly a monster, but to what degree and why are never made clear, by Ramsey or by the performers.

The film is certainly up for interpretation, but I would argue it’s best not to interpret it at all or perhaps more accurately to not attempt to “solve” the film. It’s told in fragments of memories, entirely from Eva’s likely very biased perspective, that choice seems to beg for the audience to search for clues and answers within the mystery. I think the film’s vague approach is not so the audience can try to solve it but rather because it’s impossible to solve. We all can guess as to why someone would be so broken that they’d commit mass murder, but nobody can really ever know why somebody would do such a thing, nobody can ever really know what moment or moments pushed them in to become a monster, all we can do is guess.

Rating: 8/10