We Need to Talk About Kevin

Red is the arousing violent color of choice for this pic. It opens at a Spanish festival where a large crowd pour tomatoes and tomato juice over their bodies, as red decorates the traditional bacchanal festival. Later there’s the red paint vandals throw on the Tilda Swinton character’s modest house, the red soup can labels Swinton hides behind to avoid the stares of angry judgmental parents at the supermarket and the stunning shot of blood all over Swinton’s house from the monster child’s many victims after he goes on a killing spree.

The first child of Eva and Franklin is the hostile, creepy and bad behaving Kevin, a child mom didn’t want and had a difficult delivery. The couple years later give their troubled six-year-old son a little sister named Celia, whom Kevin takes delight in abusing. The manipulative Kevin learns to treat all his family members with fake affection, and thereby narrowly avoids being targeted for professional counseling. The film follows through many back and forth flashbacks from the present the tortured mind of Eva, as she retraces how difficult it was to raise such an angry child — a child who appears to have come out of the womb evil and hateful of her. The clueless friendly father Franklin thinks Kevin will outgrow his childhood problems and when Kevin is 16, he gives his loner son an archery set-up for Christmas — a gift Kevin greatly appreciates and is the only thing in the world the kid seems to enjoy. The bow and arrow will later become the expert archer’s weapon of choice in his bloody attack. —Ozu’s World of Movie reviews