We Need To Talk About Kevin explores a metaphorical sense of loss, the horrors of motherhood that lie within the pressure of “nature vs. nurture,” and the underlying doubt that creeps up behind a mother and whispers in her ear, “What if your best isn’t good enough?” 

The film follows Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton) in the wake of something unknown that leaves her ostracised by her entire town. Viewers come to learn, through disjointed and non-chronological scenes, that the offscreen event that made her the pariah we see onscreen had something to do with her son, Kevin (Ezra Miller). Because the film starts amidst the aftermath of the tragic event, the audience deals less with the horror of the crime itself and more with the horror that remains after the fact, despite the passage of time. Concurrently, they watch as a sense of general “wrongness” in Kevin’s childhood evolves until it eventually becomes irreversible horror. 

Eva’s life passes in confusing order, examining the way it was before Kevin, the way it was with Kevin, and the way it is now because of Kevin. The fragmented storytelling leaves viewers trying to piece together exactly what happened, in the same way that Eva is trying to piece together where she might have “gone wrong” when it came to being Kevin’s mother. 

From the moment of his birth, it is clear that Eva and Kevin have a somewhat contentious relationship. While it is not uncommon to see the “angsty kid rebels against loving parent” trope, a parent reciprocating said disdain – especially a mother – is significantly more taboo. Kevin is incredibly ill-behaved when alone with Eva and perfectly “normal” around his father, Franklin (John Reilly), and the audience cannot actually determine if he is legitimately developmentally delayed or if he is intentionally toying with Eva. In Kevin’s early years, Eva seems to try to connect with him, mother to son, but as he gets older, she struggles to hide her discomfort around him – something that he notices. 

Due to the disparities in Kevin’s behavior when he’s with each parent, the early unease that Eva feels when looking at Kevin is seen as overdramatic by her husband, putting strain on their marriage to the point of considering divorce. Rather than trusting Eva’s “mother’s intuition,” Franklin admonishes her for being overdramatic and unreasonable, claiming that she is the one with the problem, not their son. While Eva tries to convince her husband that something is wrong with Kevin (to no avail), the audience watches Franklin unknowingly enable Kevin’s behavior while dismissing Eva as being unfairly critical. In the end, despite Franklin being the one who gifted Kevin with bows and arrows throughout his childhood and taught him how to shoot, Eva is the one who ends up condemned when Kevin takes that same bow and shoots his classmates at school. 

The constant fear of losing a child to something literally or metaphorically monstrous is something that every mother wrestles with on a daily basis in the real world. While some horror movies – such as A Quiet Place (2018) and The Others (2001) – confront that fear directly, We Need To Talk About Kevin turns it around and confronts audiences with something that is almost even more unthinkable: what if your kid is the monster? 

Both scenarios may be different, but they both leave a mother reeling as she contemplates what she could have possibly done differently to prevent this from ever happening. In A Quiet Place, Evelyn Abbot (Emily Blunt) agonizes over how she could have acted differently to save her youngest son from being killed by alien attackers; in We Need To Talk About Kevin, Eva numbly recounts Kevin’s childhood, wondering if Kevin was destined to be a murderer or if something in his upbringing drove him to that point. The movie provides a platform to a less “black and white” type of fear because, while there were objective things Evelyn could have done to save her son, there is no foolproof way to know whether Eva could have done anything to “save” Kevin. In fact, the unreliability of Eva’s memories, scrambled up in seemingly random order, almost makes the audience wonder which of those memories are being shown exactly as they happened and which Eva is remembering differently in order to reassure herself that Kevin’s actions didn’t have anything to do with her parenting. 

Despite watching the movie from Eva’s perspective, we, as the audience, can’t help but wonder whether Kevin would have turned out differently had Eva “tried harder” to be an unconditionally loving mother to him. Did she actually try her best? If she did, why did Kevin turn out the way he did? Was there anything she could’ve done that might have prevented it? This line of questioning results in her being seen as “responsible” for both the metaphorical loss of her own child, who wound up in prison, and the literal loss of the children Kevin murdered. 

We Need To Talk About Kevin is a 112-minute visual portrayal of what happens when a mother’s fear of not being “good enough” comes true, leading to an irreversible kind of loss that crosses both literal and physical planes. Furthermore, it is an extreme representation of the judgment that mothers face from themselves, their families, and even comp;lete strangers for the actions of their children. Can enough “mother’s love” prevent a child from becoming something horrible, or is it ingrained from the start? In the end, there’s no way to know for sure. Eva has to live with the loss that Kevin caused – whether she was responsible or not.