By Jason Haskins
Tilda Swinton stars as the mother of a kid who was not right from the start. He grows up until high school and decides to massacre students with his bow and arrow. Jumping between past (where it shows Swinton’s character trying to raise and relate to this clearly disturbed child) and present (where all of the townspeople hate her because she didn’t do anything sooner), you are given an inside look into how an event like this affects the people responsible for raising these kids. The movie isn’t as predictable as you’d think. This features a more sadistic type of killer who’s insane and depraved from the beginning and has a dad (John C. Reilly) who doesn’t seem to notice.
To be honest, I wasn’t a big fan of this film. I had heard about this in passing quite a bit in the later months of 2011, as it was receiving heaps of praise in the cinema circuits, but I was quite disappointed with the final product. Lynn Ramsay directed a very cold and opportunistic movie that lacks any real cohesion. Through over-obsessive use of focusing and un-focusing the lens she not only spoon-feeds sentiment (or lack thereof), but tries to be overly creative and artistic under such a thin disguise of simply not knowing how to handle the script.
The script she and Rory Stewart Kinnear worked on based off the book by Lionel Shriver is sort of bad. Everything is so darn predictable, especially if you’ve seen a similar movie (hell, Orphan was similar). It’s like a horror movie where it makes you feel uncomfortable with certain things, but never really delivers on much of anything because of how restricting the script is and how little they show you to create a feasible sense of emotion on the part of the audience. The things that are elaborated on aren’t very interesting, nor very pleasant, and at the end of the day I could really care less—especially concerning Swinton’s character who remains in the same town as this tragedy occurred and has confrontations with the townspeople all throughout the movie quite unreasonably and unrealistically. This felt like a big exploitation of the concept and it didn’t sit well with me.
The performances are really the only reason I could recommend this to someone. Tilda Swinton never disappoints and again brings her A game to the film portraying a frustrated and scared mother who can’t control her child. It’s heartbreaking to see how much pain she goes through in this movie and how much her husband doesn’t believe her about a single thing. When Kevin gets older he’s portrayed by Ezra Miller, who’s so downright creepy and twisted that he deserves a nod as his future in the movies is cemented here. Every time he’s on screen you watch him like how you watch a shark after its prey—knowing something brutal is going to happen.
I really don’t see why this is getting so many smatters of applause because it’s not a really likeable movie—not that it tries to be, but it’s not a movie that has any real depth to it. It’s just a cheap trick to adapt a book that’s about a grisly subject. Even the music by Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead fame doesn’t sit well with me. Nothing really did about this film, aside from the performances, and I would never sit through this movie again. It’s not just that it’s unpleasant, it’s uninteresting and has been done too many times before by better, more capable filmmakers.
2 out of 5 stars
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