We need to talk about kevin (2011) Review

What the hell is wrong with me? I was having a lovely morning, the sun was shining, the flowers in my backyard smelled beautiful, so then I come inside and I watch THIS.

In all seriousness, Lynne Ramsay is truly one of the best visual storytellers we have. It's so rare to see a director who is so minimalistic yet it never feels abstract. She does so much with so little, and a lot of that is from the specificity of little sensory details, and it's also because of some incredible performances. It seems redundant to praise Tilda Swinton, but my lord she's pitch perfect here. This is a character who could either become far too sympathetic or far too villainous depending on how she was played, but Tilda and Lynne find the perfect goldilocks zone in-between.

There's a lot to be said about how this movie unpacks the complex relationship between nature vs nurture, and while I think that's a big part of the movie, I thought it was secondary to the main idea of exploring how much of a thankless burden motherhood can be. Not only is it a physically and mentally excruciating process, but the second a mother doesn't handle it properly they're suddenly considered evil. The dad gets a free pass, but the mother has to be perfect from the getgo. But where this movie succeeds is that it explores the idea without having an agenda. Their are no innocent characters, but there are also no unjustified characters. You don't walk away from a movie like this with a strong idea of who the good guys and bad guys are, but hopefully you walk away with a stronger sense of empathy and a deeper understanding of how imperfect people can be.