“I used to think I knew. Now I’m not so sure.” That’s how Kevin answers his mother, Eva, on a prison visit two years after his crimes, when she finally asks him why he did it.
After her son murders students at his school, Eva Khatchadourian faces her neighbors’ hostility while continuing to visit him in prison. In We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), she’s also lost her husband and daughter: Kevin killed them, too.
Tilda Swinton plays Eva, a former travel writer whose life after the killings has narrowed to isolation and a low-level job. Director Lynne Ramsay cuts between that aftermath and Eva’s memories of raising Kevin, leaving the audience to piece together the family life that preceded the attack.
Eva struggles to connect with him from infancy. As he grows older, his coldness and manipulation toward her coexist with a charm he shows his father, Franklin, played by John C. Reilly.
Franklin repeatedly brushes aside her concerns. They’re raising the same child, but Eva’s alarm finds little support inside their marriage.
Ezra Miller plays the teenage Kevin, who carefully plans the school attack and carries it out with a bow and arrows. The violence leaves Eva facing both the loss of her family and a community that treats her as responsible for what her son did.
Adapted from Lionel Shriver’s 2003 novel, the film stays close to Eva’s fragmented perspective. It examines maternal ambivalence and the expectation that a mother’s love should come automatically, while leaving unresolved how Kevin became capable of such violence. Eva’s visits to her imprisoned son continue after he’s killed his father, his sister, and his classmates.
