We Need to Talk About Kevin UK, USA 2011 – 110min.

Movie Rating

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Movie Rating: Agathe Tissier

A woman lives with the guilty weight of having born a son with Machiavellian tendencies.

Eva obstinately and patiently raises her adolescent son Kevin, who has been angry since childhood. But the boy knows how to get what he wants by showing different faces: while manipulating and cynical in front of his mother, he is tender and understanding with his father. As he grows up, he begins to show real signs of violence - both controlled and buried - which threaten to explode. He becomes increasingly cruel, until one day his actions escalate and he does the worst. But his mother stands by him, trying to understand the son she still loves. Paying every day for her son's deeds and accepting responsibility, she lives through a hell where the blood her son has spilled runs endlessly.

With the same sense of helplessness as his mother, the audience watches a monster grow up, as if caught in the trap of this Machiavellian child who moves his pawns like a grand master in the art of manipulation. Doubt about who's to blame unfolds subtly through the film, somewhere between an oedipal tale gone horribly wrong and a mother with undying love for her son. Anxiety-producing but striking... right on target.

10.11.2020

4

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simpsonb

12 years ago

Terrifying and moving. Tilda Swinton is brilliant.


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