We Need to Talk About Kevin is the latest addition to a long list of “bad seed” films that prey on parents’ worst nightmares. Based on Lionel Shriver’s 2003 book, it tells the story of a woman who can’t bond with her first child, a boy who ultimately turns into a malevolent monster, taking down nine high-school classmates with a crossbow.
As in most films of the kid-gone-badly-awry genre (starting with 1956’s The Bad Seed, and also including such notable entries as Rosemary’s Baby, The Other, The Exorcist and The Good Son), in Kevin, pint-sized evil lurks in a seemingly normal home, and unspools through a badly dysfunctional relationship between a child and parent. In our own era of parental perfectionism, We Need to Talk About Kevin plumbs the deepest wells of maternal anxiety through the eyes of Tilda Swinton’s Eva, a travel writer who had a somewhat exotic life before marrying the good-natured Franklin (John C. Reilly), with whom she has two children.
Eva has had no trouble bonding with her mild-mannered daughter. But with her son, who was truculent and combative from birth, she feels no connection. Playing on the time-honoured theme of blaming moms for kids gone wrong, We Need to Talk About Kevin simultaneously explores a woman’s discomfort with her child’s behaviour and her own deep guilt over her inability to love him.
“Mothers, in particular, are seen as at fault for a child who turns bad,” offers Nicholas Sammond, associate professor of cinema studies and English at the University of Toronto. “Even if a father has abused the child in question, the narrative often hints that the inattention of the mother allowed him to do so.”
Scottish director Lynne Ramsay, who was in Canada last September for Kevin’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, says she was drawn to Shriver’s book because it took on the “taboo topic” of what happens when maternal instinct simply doesn’t kick in. “I was immediately attracted to the subject matter of a mother who doesn’t like her kid,” said Ramsay, whose previous films Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar also explored varieties of human misery.
Swinton’s Eva is a detached, somewhat prickly mother, but not mean-spirited, or in any way abusive to her son. Ramsay says she wanted to explore the uncertainty, guilt and fear inherent in parenting. “We all know examples of families where two children have the same genetic inheritance and exactly the same upbringing, and who behave in vastly different ways. It’s a genuine puzzle,” she noted.
“In my own family, I have a brother who has been in trouble since he was 12. He has a personality of his own. He’s now 45, and he still goes back to my mom when he lands in hot water. She’s now 75, but she is the mom, and she has to take care of this boy until her dying days. In this film adaptation, I wasn’t trying to make social commentary between nature versus nurture. I just wanted to make a film about a painful reality that audiences would be able to watch, albeit with some dread.”
Toronto director Vincenzo Natali, whose 2009 sci-fi thriller Splice delivered an alien version of the archetypal bad seed, thinks that every horror film offers up a “reflection of some aspect of ourselves, as individuals and society.” Adds Natali, “We ask the question all the time: Are we products of our environments or our genes? And we’ll never have an answer, because it’s a complicated alchemy of the two. … The bad-seed film holds up a mirror to our own fears about ourselves, and what we’re capable of.”
In press notes for We Need to Talk About Kevin, Swinton echoes Natali’s sentiments, saying “the nightmare for Eva is not that her son is violent and horrible in some foreign way, but that he is violent and horrible in familiar ways.”
Ezra Miller, who plays the teenaged Kevin, and accompanied Ramsay to Toronto last fall, says he was keen to be cast in the part because the film asks questions, and explores issues of parental and filial love, that most people don’t want to face. “This movie is about a person who is born, and is immediately aware of, this ugly, universal truth of aggressive nature. Was Kevin born an evil aberration? Or is his mom to blame for projecting on him?” mused Miller (whose next film is the romantic drama The Perks of Being a Wallflower with Emma Watson).
“Who knows?” he continued. “But I do know there are such unrealistic standards in society for what a mother should be, or for what a kid should be. And those unrealistic standards are dangerous. In this film, I blame a character we don’t see – and that is civilization.”
