The Cinematheque

“Thought-provoking, confident, and fearless. It’s experimental but never alienating and horrific in all the right ways.”

Dave Calhoun, Time Out

We Need to Talk About Kevin
United Kingdom/​USA 2011
Lynne Ramsay
112 min. 35mm

After years of false starts and creative impasses, Lynne Ramsay finally followed up 2002’s beguiling Morvern Callar with this chilling, fever-dream character study of a mother whose child commits mass murder. Based on the eponymous 2003 novel by Lionel Shriver, Ramsay’s third feature—and first made in America—stars a mesmerizing Tilda Swinton as Eva, a former travel writer whose life is violently derailed when her teenage son Kevin (Ezra Miller) opens fire on a gymnasium full of classmates. The hallucinatory horror story is viewed through the prism of the mother’s anguished (and unreliable) psyche, as she fitfully rakes through her memories in a desperate effort to know why he did it, and if she is to blame. John C. Reilly, in a welcome dramatic turn, is Eva’s husband and Kevin’s father, oblivious to his son’s increasingly sociopathic behaviour. Swinton garnered heaps of awards for her tour-de-force performance. Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood scores.

Print courtesy of TIFF Film Reference Library

“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.” Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

preceded by

Gasman
United Kingdom 1998
Lynne Ramsay
15 min. Blu-ray Disc

A young girl struggles to make sense of her father’s affection for another child in this poignant and exquisitely shot Christmastime short, winner of a BAFTA and prizes at Cannes and Locarno.