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Anthony Benigno full bio of Anthony Benigno Kevin (Ezra Miller) has the jet-black hair of a devil-child and a smug, self-satisfied smirk plastered across his face at all times. He preens from room to room with a kind of private, mischievous glint in his eyes, like he knows the dirty secrets of everyone around him. He's a distant, self-absorbed kid who thrives on mocking his family and friends and engineering cruel pranks; he encompasses the very worst stereotypes of a sullen teenage boy and yet, at the same time, something much more sinister is happening with him that nobody but his mother Eva (Tilda Swinton) seems to notice.
And if this setup for Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin sounds like a schlocky pitch for Psycho: The Next Generation or something like that, then, erm, it kinda sorta is. Kevin is clearly cut from the same cloth as Norman Bates, although he's a much more flamboyant presence than Anthony Perkins's classic character: he's a budding sociopath who looks with disdain on everyone else and flaunts his contempt in grand fashion, although his motives or particular gripes with society remain generally unclear. But give Ramsay's film credit for the exploitative feel of its elevator pitch; the film, based on a 2006 novel by Lionel Shriver, jumps back and forth between two time periods: one where Eva is married in a big house and running a successful travel agent office, and another where she is alone, borderline destitute, drowning herself in wine and wiling away the hours at a crappy mini-mall travel agency.Kevin only pops up as an odd, distant, and cruel boy in the earlier timeline (big props to Jasper Neuell and Rock Dauer, whose portrayals of the younger Kevin fit in perfectly with Miller's) and it doesn't take us long to realize the whole thing is building to some explosive act of violence on Kevin's part. This incident serves as the transition from one time period to the other, yet, even with the threat of the crime looming over the narrative, the movie wisely avoids horror-movie territory and shies away from bloodshed. Instead, it is a masterful exercise in suspense and implication that benefits, first and foremost, from the fact that it refuses to train its gaze permanently on Kevin and keeps its focus on the people who observe (or ignore) his actions.
As Eva, Swinton gives a painfully raw performance; she inhabits Eva's desperation and helplessness without succumbing to hamminess, and so much of the character is conveyed in what she does not say than what she does, since We Need to Talk About Kevin is really a movie about silence. Eva looks like she's constantly about to scream out some kind of warning to the heavens, and Swinton admirably conveys the shaky resolve of a woman who is constantly clinging to the fast-fading hope that she might be wrong.
The movie does, in its earlier moments, succumb to an odd bout of art-house pretentiousness that threatens to derail the enterprise in a wave of moody, experimental mush. But Ramsay finds her way quickly, navigating the quick cuts and time jumps in her and Rory Kinnear's screenplay with a deft skill and an eye for building up suspense. Despite the movie's somewhat foregone conclusion, she never lets the audience lose the slightest bit of hope that everything will turn out OK.
And yet, despite the fantastic work of everyone involved, it is Miller who walks away with the entire thing. He gives a near-flawless performance, embodying every tic of a self-satisfied teenager while letting just enough of Kevin's deeper nature shine through at each turn to hint at the horrors to come. Given that he just played a variation on the same role in Another Happy Day, it's easy to wish, in the back of your mind, that he be cast in a role where he wasn't playing a troubled misanthrope. (One could say something similar for Reilly, who is fantastic as always but is too good an actor to constantly be playing dolts.) But the proof is in the pudding when it comes to Miller's performance here. He's all everyone will be talking about, and rightfully so.
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