We Need to Talk About Kevin is an eviscerating examination of nature versus nurture, an indictment of motherhood, maternal guilt, and the responsibility society places squarely on the shoulders of women for the outcome of our offspring. Director Lynne Ramsay, who adapted the script off the Lionel Shriver novel with Rory Kinnear, connects the viewer to the discombobulated state of mind of the film’s protagonist, Eva (Tilda Swinton, as good as she’s ever been here), by shuttling the audience back-and-forth between the present, where Eva is dealing relentlessly with the aftermath of her teenage son committing a horrendous act of violence; the distant past, before marriage and motherhood, when feminist, intellectual, Eva was a free-spirited world traveler; and the more recent past that encapsulates her life imprisoned in motherhood and her disconnection from her strange, almost other-worldly son.

And Kevin is a odd boy, from his beginnings as a baby who won’t stop crying, to the stony, baleful glare that is his hallmark from toddler-hood. Eva has no maternal connection to her child, but is it because there’s something wrong with her, or with him? She stares at her bloated, pregnant belly not with awe and wonder, but with fear and something approaching loathing, a palpable contradiction to what we women are trained from childhood to expect when we’re expecting. There is no spiritual glow, no aura of the radiant Madonna, enveloping Eva; only a sullen, barely contained anger and resentment that we later see mirrored in her son. Is Eva merely resentful of the lifestyle changes motherhood brings upon her? Suffering from a particularly wrenching and damaging form of post-partum depression? Just not wired with the necessary tools of empathy and self-sacrifice to give fully of herself to her son? Was Kevin by nature a bad seed, born wired to be a sociopath, or did his nurturing, or lack thereof, evolve a normal boy into a monster?
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