Review #8 - We Need to Talk About Kevin

We Need To Talk About Kevin is a film in which Kevin is never talked about, nor is the fact he needs to be talked about ever talked about. It's also not even a retitle of Home Alone. It’s a film about a woman who accidentally gave birth to the world’s smartest psychopath child. She was a bad parent, and he a bad child, so naturally this leads to him shooting up his school. There are several things I don’t like about this movie. I will thushenceforthyonder discuss what I don’t like. It’s 1:00 AM as I start this and I forgot all the names already. Let’s do this.

Kevin is the dude with the Jaden Smith lips.
Kevin's mom is the guy on top.

            I watched this movie because it was suggested in a Reddit thread entitled something like “[REQUEST] US Netflix’s most unsettling or disconcerting movies”. Now, you know me. I like to be unsettled and have my concert undid. I thought “Hey, I got two hours to procrastinate with! I’ll give it a go!” So I done loaded the Netflix machine up and watched it. Now let me tell you, folks, I was not as disconcerted as I had hoped to be.

            The movie presents the story by cutting periodically between the kid’s childhood, his mother’s life after he killed some people, and the night that he actually killed some people. Maybe it’s because I had just watched Memento the night before (which isn’t about memes or meme-ing into things in any way, much to my disappointment), but I thought that the whole “we’ll show you bits of a complete story from different periods of the story, so you won’t have the complete picture until the end” was lacking. There were large periods of the same timeframe, then suddenly it would jump around again quickly, then another large period of the same timeframe. If you’re going to build suspense through switching between timeframes and hiding something from your audience, do it consistently. Don’t move around when it suits you. It makes it feel less suspenseful and more annoying. Not to mention that this narrative technique is usually used to hide something good from the audience, which they find out at the end and go “Whaaaaaaat!”, but the only reveal in this film is that the kid shot up his school, which you can infer from the first several seconds of the film anyway. There’s a slightly more specific reveal, which was even worse. But that’s not my main problem with the film. I can forgive that.

            The main problem I have with We Need To Talk About Kevin is the fact that the childhood of the future-killer is just… dumb. When he’s born, he won’t stop crying, which makes his mom hate him. Before birthing Rosemary’s baby part deux, she travelled the world and was a free spirit gluten free indigo child or something. APPARENTLY she wasn’t ready to have a kid and give up that lifestyle, because the SECOND he acts like a normal child and cries, she hates him. This happens again and again as he grows up. He does something wrong, she hates him and wishes she could go back to living in France and contributing nothing to society. At one point, she even breaks his arm because he soils himself on purpose. WHAT THE HELL, LADY?

Apparently this is supposed to be justified because he… wait for it… he’s a psychopath that has it out for her and wants to make her life a living hell. He’s doing it all on purpose! Even from the young age of really young, he hates her. He pretends to like her when his dad is around, then acts out against her when it’s just him and mom. This creates friction between the parents, since the dad thinks the mom is making it all up. The kid is just a brilliant mastermind who plots his family’s destruction since the ripe age of -9 months. It’s like this film was originally written as the edgy reboot for Baby Geniuses but the production company decided to change the name at the last second and dumped the responsibility on Ted, the brand new intern with a fresh degree in art history from WSU. Kevin (I just realized his name is Kevin. The film is named after him. I need to go to bed) is never shown to be an actual human being. You know the kind. The ones who, ya know, go through a believable childhood and have to rely on his parents to not let him accidentally kill himself every 5 seconds. He just exists to hate his mom for not being a good mom when he was an infant or something.

Tomatoes are a symbol throughout this film because they're red. And blood is red.
Or maybe it's about communism. Who knows? Seize the means of produce! ('cause it's a grocery store)

Now this two-dimensional paper cutout of a character decides that the best way to get back at his mom for her existence is to kill his dad, sister, and schoolmates. The big reveal is that he does this not with a gun, but with a bow. A bow might seem like a strange tool to kill people with in this age of rootie-tootie-point-and-shooties, which it is. See, he chooses a bow because his mom read him a Robin Hood book once. That book inspired him to take up archery, and later use those skills to create moderately-educated porcupines in his school gymnasium. Get it? Do ya get it? GET IT? IT’S SYMBOLISM! The bow is just a symbol for how his mom led him to do all this! I solved it! 

 Except the mom wasn’t really all THAT bad. She didn't deserve to have raised a family annihilator and school shooter. I’d hate my kid, too, if he turned out to be the offspring of Albert Einstein and Gary Ridgway. But the amount of hatred she has for him wouldn't produce such awful products. Both the mother and son are just dumb and bad at being people.

The third component of the story (a far too large chunk of it) is the mother’s life after her son did all this nonsense and tomfoolery, but it’s overall uninteresting and unimportant. It’s more of a vehicle to launch the other two components than tell anything new. She repeatedly gets harassed by the local townsfolk for being the mother of a killer, as if that’s reasonable at all. If I were her, I’d just leave town, but what do I know?

Well, folks, I know that We Need To Talk About Kevin could have been better. It had a poorly thought out plot featuring an unbelievable and unrealistic plot point. I love films that deal with dark and macabre subjects, especially ones that are so psychological. I had high hopes for this film, but they were dashed across a wall and laid in front of Tywin Lannister. 

But it wasn’t that bad. I kinda liked it.  

I give it a 6/10.