The filmmakers go to some lengths to render Kevin as a sociopath. Eva pays her son visits in prison, understandably tortured sequences. A woman, presumably the mother of one of Kevin’s victims, slaps her on a public street. Her family’s infamy has followed her: her small house is pelted with red paint, strangers whisper about her behind her back. She lost everything in the catastrophe, and now ekes out a living working in a travel agency, where she is something of a pariah. These episodes from Kevin’s upbringing are intercut with scenes of Eva’s wretched existence in the present. The parents are on the verge of divorce when the school tragedy takes place. The ever optimistic Franklin rejects his wife’s claims about their son, and suggests she needs to seek psychiatric help. When a family pet dies, and a younger daughter loses an eye to caustic cleaning fluid, Kevin’s mother knows who to blame. Ominously, he becomes an expert marksman as a teenager. The one thing Kevin (Ezra Miller, as the older boy) does take to is archery. Later, he takes a squirt-gun and sprays ink all over the maps with which she has carefully decorated her office.
As a toddler, Kevin scowls constantly and does whatever he can to make his mother’s life miserable.
In one scene, Eva stops on the street near a construction worker operating a pneumatic drill to drown out the infant’s wailing. Kevin is nothing but trouble from the moment of his birth. Some of this discontent apparently rubs off on and damages her offspring. She seems anxious and out of place in the new home. Having led a quasi-bohemian life in the city as a travel writer, Eva finds herself talked into moving to a large, sterile house in the suburbs (“our very own castle”) by her well-meaning husband, Franklin (John C. His mother, Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton), we soon discover, was somewhat ambivalent about having a child in the first place. In flashbacks, we learn something about his short, unhappy life. Before the film opens, the character referred to in the title of Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, at the age of 15, has massacred a number of his fellow schoolmates.
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