Are monsters born, or are they made? It’s obvious that Eva (Tilda Swinton) was ambivalent about her pregnancy, and by the time her son Kevin was born, she realized that having a child was never something she wanted. Throughout all stages of the Kevin’s life, we see just how aware he is of his mother’s indifference, and how he uses it against her. As a baby, he cries incessantly. As a toddler, he develops slowly, not learning how to speak and seeming uninterested in simple activities like rolling a ball on the floor. He remains in diapers well into his elementary school years, at which point he provokes his mother in more personal ways. As a teen, he appears to have adopted no sense of morality towards his family or people in general, regarding just about everyone with contempt. It’s at this point that he massacres a group of his classmates in the school gym with a bow and arrow.

“We Need to Talk about Kevin,” based on the novel by Lionel Shriver, is a tremendously challenging film. It’s not only because of its ambiguous characters and emotionally draining subject matter, but also because it provides us with no answers. But really, what answer would suffice? That Kevin is definitely a sociopath? That he was unquestionably raised by a bad mother? We can all agree that a terrible crime has been committed, and yet these go-to explanations say more about the intrinsic need to assign guilt than they do about the people involved. In Kevin’s case, the word “sociopath” is never officially applied. And with the exception of the school tragedy, all of the things he gets blamed for remain unproven. We only have strong implications, most of which are made by Eva. And what of her? Inattentiveness, which is indisputably her condition, is not now and has never been an automatic catalyst for a child’s bad behavior.

The film is constructed not as a linear story but as a random jumble of memories. Essentially, Eva is trying to process her life over the past twenty years or so. We see her first happy dates with Franklin (John C. Reilly), who would go on to be her husband. We see her as a successful travel agent. We see them together when Kevin is already born; Franklin, though loving, lives in a deluded state of familial idealism, and has been manipulated so thoroughly by Kevin that he continuously turns a blind eye to his cruelty. He will, in fact, often accuse Eva of blowing situations way out of proportion. We see their second child, a girl named Celia (Ashley Gerasimovich), who we suspect was conceived solely to satisfy Eva’s desperate need to bond with a child. Indeed, she dotes over her daughter, and the two get along wonderfully. But how fair is this, replacing one child with another?

We see her after the school tragedy, understandably shellshocked. She lives alone in a new house and is forced to take a job at a second-rate travel agency in a strip mall. She’s despised by the much of the community for being the mother of a murderer. She spends much of her time scraping red paint off of her front porch – obviously the work of angry vandals. In an early scene, she’s approached by a woman she doesn’t know and is quite suddenly smacked across the face. Does Eva deserve this kind of treatment? She’s later approached by one of Kevin’s victims, who now sits in a wheelchair. The young man shows no hostility towards Eva at all. Does he have a right to be mad at her? We see her visiting Kevin in prison, unsuccessfully trying to probe his mind and find a reason why.

The two key performances are by Jasper Newell and Ezra Miller. The former plays Kevin from the ages of six to eight, while the latter plays him as a teenager. As played by both actors, we see a horrifying yet remarkably intelligent person working, and in two distinct instances succeeding, at getting his mother’s attention. This is not to suggest that he craves her love. He wants, for lack of a better term, an audience. The irony is that, despite Kevin’s viciousness and Eva’s intensifying fear of her son, they are the most authentic people in each other’s lives. Eva probably understands her son better than she cares to admit. Complicating these characters and their relationship even further are two scenes in which Kevin actively seeks his mother’s affection.

Questions will repeatedly surface. Did Kevin intentionally put caustic drain fluid in his sister’s eye, causing permanent blindness and the need for a glass replacement? Did he knowingly kill her pet gerbil and stuff it into the garbage disposal? Director/co-writer Lynne Ramsay is well aware of the conclusions most audiences will automatically come to, and that’s what makes this movie so fascinating: It ultimately says more about us than it does about the characters. No matter who you are, no matter what you believe, you will definitely be bringing something to “We Need to Talk about Kevin.” It shows not the slightest interest in actions or even in consequences, but in behaviors – and, consequently, in the mystery of their very existence. On that note, I leave you with the very same question I started this review with. Are monsters born, or are they made?

- Chris Pandolfi

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