Critics reviews

We Need To Talk About Kevin is not an enjoyable film. Just like that endlessly deferred conversation, it's something from which we may instinctively turn away; yet it carries a similar note of compulsion. This is something we need to talk about because, Ramsay implies, its roots are in every one of us.

Ramsay leans full-throttle into her predispositions toward introspective horror; there’s a vivid sense of the traumatic undercurrent of being indirectly responsible for a catastrophic event. The idea of lingering trauma is one few horror movies truly reckon with, but it’s in this film front-and-center.

It's a dazzling dirge, and this time I clung even more desperately to its one mysterious, destabilizing interlude: Kevin's sudden tender affection for Eva when he gets sick. But the faint echo in the film's closing scene, as he awaits transfer to prison proper, just wasn't enough, and I was set adrift once again.

A jigsaw exercise in disassembly, suggestive of a catastrophe so explosive it has splintered time... The film trumps Shriver’s credulity-straining methods of recap, removing control so thoroughly from its main character that [Eva] can’t even marshal her own flashbacks – they happen to her out of the blue.

"We Need to Talk About Kevin" has a simple story, and yet the movie's plot is convoluted... The narrative strategy amounts to little more than film-school strenuousness, and in the end it can't conceal the movie's essential crudeness - its coarse, artless dialogue, blank character writing and intellectual vacuity.

Ramsay seems to be seriously intent on probing the outer limits of a mother’s love and forgiveness, but the boy (played by a trio of child actors) is so unremittingly evil that the movie begins to feel like a grotesque remake of that old John Ritter comedy Problem Child (1990).

It tears this figure [motherhood] apart, not so much to critique it from some high-political distance, but so as to return us to the magma of every individual human being who has to cope with this world: the abject deposits and fluids, the niggly neuroses, the interrupted discharges, the aborted circuits of interrelationship. More than any 3D movie past or present, Ramsay creates an immersive cinema.

Lynne Ramsay’s coolly calculated drama... masquerades as a psychological puzzle but is essentially a horror film full of decorous sensationalism... The actors are uniformly skillful (and Reilly’s voice is one of the current cinema’s charms), but Ramsay gives them little but prefabricated attitudes to work with.

We Need To Talk About Kevin is a modern American horror story, and one that in the wake of Columbine and other apparently random teen atrocities, strikes me as tremendously brave... It's a disturbing film on many, many levels, but beautifully shot (by Seamus McGarvey) and shot through with a horrific sense of false hope.

Kevin is an extraordinary work from Ramsay, a filmmaker with an uncommon gift for getting at the inner psychology of her characters through striking visuals.

Acting doesn't much better than the subtly brilliant display put on by Tilda Swinton in We Need to Talk About Kevin... You may leave with your head spinning, but Kevin will have you talking plenty.

“We Need to Talk About Kevin” is about a nightmare on your street... a domestic horror story that literally gets to us where we live, a disturbing tale told with uncompromising emotionality and great skill by filmmaker Lynne Ramsay.