Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (March 23, 2022)
When a teenager commits an atrocity, questions always arise about what went wrong. With 2011’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, we get a drama that confronts this subject matter.
Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton) deals with an unspecified trauma. Though the nature of this issue remains unrevealed initially, we see that her neighbors view her as a pariah.
While we explore Eva’s current status, we also relive her past. This leads us to see the life of her troubled son Kevin from birth to teens (Ezra Miller), as we learn of his role in the family’s problems.
Promotional materials for Talk make it clear where the story will go, and the movie offers strong hints early, so we don’t get a true “revelation” at any point. Still, to avoid spoilers, I’ll leave these topics untouched.
Talk really attempts to examine what leads to violent events more than anything, though I can’t say it does so with much real introspection. We approach the material mainly from Eva’s perspective, and that doesn’t work especially well.
To some degree, this POV allows the movie to seem subjective, as we wonder whether or not Kevin really offers an enfant terrible as depicted or if she sees him as more awful than he is. A writer famous for travel-related works and a nomad at heart, we see Eva resists domesticity and appears decidedly ambivalent about motherhood.
As such, the movie wants us to think that perhaps Kevin is a “normal kid” but Eva’s perceptions distort his actions. However, Talk doesn’t portray this well, and Kevin displays more than enough objectively horrifying behavior that it becomes tough to see him as even vaguely benign.
This becomes an intriguing way to tell the story, but Talk overdoes Kevin’s negativity to make him seem monstrous from the start. Again, because we view this from Eva’s POV, there remains potential question about the accuracy of what we watch, but Talk doesn’t convey this potential distortion well.
Face it: film tends to be a fairly literal medium. While some flicks can pull off skewed perspectives, as viewers, we usually take what we see as objective reality, not subjective interpretation.
As a result, Talk can feel heavy-handed and perplexing, mainly because Kevin acts out enough that it makes little sense he receives apparently little to no interventions along the way, especially given the family’s well-off status. There’s simply no way a kid like Kevin could behave in the manner depicted without actions from the school.
Even if Kevin’s teachers and administrators ignored all the red flags – which seems more and more unlikely in the post-Columbine era where kids get disciplined for using their fingers as “guns” – Eva easily could’ve and would’ve gotten outside professionals involved. The family clearly boasts the wherewithal to take Kevin to a slew of psychological/behavioral professionals, but apparently this doesn’t occur.
Talk just lacks subtlety period. The film opens with aggressive echoes of “fight” over a football game, and the bright red splat from a tomato battle offer an obvious hint at blood.
Other elements provide heavy-handed foreshadowing that doesn’t well, too. When we see how Kevin becomes an avid archer, we know this will lead someplace unfortunate.
I applaud the fact Talk attempts to take on a difficult topic, at least. When kids “go bad”, questions always arise related to how that occurred, so I appreciate the film’s ambitions as it tries to dig into this area.
Unfortunately, Talk becomes so one-sided that it lacks the impressionism and subjectivity it believes it delivers. This feels more like a horror movie ala The Omen than a serious drama about childhood trauma.