We Need to Talk About Kevin

In order to understand We Need to Talk About Kevin and how Ramsay is able to operate as a filmmaker within UK film industry you have to understand how that film industry operates.  

While the UK has one of the biggest film industries in the world and generated around £5 billion of revenue in 2018, it is dwarfed by the American film industry which made in excess of £25 billion in revenue in the same year.  The British film industry is structured in a very different way to the mainstream, vertically integrated American film industry.  Rather than being distribution lead and commercially driven it is largely production lead, with filmmakers or production companies developing productions before securing finance or distribution deals.  Much of the funding for UK films comes from three publicly owned non-profit organisations, the BFI, the BBC and Channel 4.  While the UK film industry does produce the occasional global commercial hit, when compared to the mainstream American film industry much of its output is more low key, made on relatively low production budgets and watched by a primarily domestic audience.  However, arguably the smaller scale and production lead and less commercially driven nature of the British film industry allows some filmmakers opportunities to work in more experimental or unconventional ways.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is  adapted from a novel by the American writer Lionel Shriver, BBC Films bought the film production rights to the book in 2005 and Ramsay was signed to write the screenplay and direct soon after.  As with many British films, We Need to Talk about Kevin ended up being funded from a range of different sources,  BBC Films were the principal financiers but it also received lottery funding through the UK Film Council (the forerunner of the BFI Film Fund) and funding from a number of film production and financing companies. Ramsay had to make significant changes to her original screenplay to reduce the film’s production costs and make it easier for the project to secure the funding it needed to go into production.

The film premiered in May 2011 at the Cannes Film Festival in France, it opened in the UK on 21st October 2011 and on only a single screen in America on 4th September the same year, at its widest release it was shown at 80 screens in the US. We Need to Talk About Kevin was  nominated for a number of awards at international film festivals, winning (amongst others) the award for Best Film at the 2011 London Film Festival. The film achieved a worldwide box office gross of  $10.8 million, making a profit of $3.8 million.  

Ramsay has never been an overtly “political” filmmaker but arguably her films have reflected and/or indirectly commented on the historical, social and political periods they were created in or set in.  Ramsay’s earlier work (her short films and her first two features Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar) focused on the lives of working class characters trying to exist, and find a meaning for their existence, in marginalised communities in  modern day de-industrialised Britain.  

In order to understand this we maybe need to have an understanding of some of the political changes that took place in the UK and USA from the 1970s to the present day. The post war economic boom came to an end in the early 1970s and by the 1980s Britain (under Margaret Thatcher) and America (under Presidents Regan and Bush) had a new kind of conservative, right wing government. This period became defined by a political and economic culture known by its critics as neo-conservatism.  Those critical of this political philosophy say it has reduced the role of the government in public life, empowered and enriched large corporations at the expense of individuals, increased social inequality and the gap between the rich and the poor and lead to a culture of individualism where people have to compete with each other and take what they can in order to survive.  During this period Britain, America and other developed countries have also seen a process of de-industrialisation, with many heavy industries and the skilled, secure, well paid  jobs they provided, which often held entire communities together, being lost  This lead to high levels of unemployment and then the replacement of those secure, well paid jobs with low paid, often insecure transient work.

Political debates about the nature of crime and punishment, particularly in regard to issues of criminal responsibility and terrorism have been frequent and intense in the UK and internationally. The question about Kevin’s criminal responsibility because of his age and family upbringing, as well as his mental state, can be usefully explored in this film. Similarly, there are interesting political debates raised by the film in the nature of Eva’s character and her relationship with Kevin. The film raises issues of a woman’s responsibilities to her children and broaches the taboo subject of a mother who doesn’t seem to like her children.

What the film suggests about parenting and the influences of parents upon their children can be a fruitful approach to this film. Both Franklin and Eva can be described as parents who tried to be good parents but failed, in different ways, to understand and connect with their children. 

Both parents challenge the stereotypical roles of father and mother whilst seeming to provide well for their children, certainly in material terms. The film shows us the possible effects of parenting on children but also raises the question of what causes dysfunction within the family.

Eva’s character and her function within the narrative breaks the taboo subject of considering how and why women may not take to the expected role of mother ‘naturally’. Eva struggles to inhabit the role of mother and grows to hate her son which will challenge spectator expectations even in the face of Kevin’s apparent evil..

The film poses the question of who is the real monster, Kevin or Eva? Another fascinating facet of this approach to the film is the ways in which Eva hates her son yet feels guilty for the impact this may have had upon him and, by extension, the deaths of the other children. Despite hating him, he is still her child.

The film can be seen as a psychological horror that examines the nature of evil – raising questions about how evil originates, how we should deal with it and our compulsion to try to understand it and contain it. Kevin represents the discourse concerning whether evil is innate or learned and the more metaphorical, perhaps theological, question about whether evil is an objective reality or a subjective judgement. The narrative structure takes us on a journey in which we find ourselves compelled to find out the motivation of evil in an attempt to contain it, only to discover that its true nature is, perhaps, unfathomable. At the end of the film the prison guard tells us, ‘Time’s up’, and we have to leave with our questions still largely unresolved.