We Need to Talk About Kevin (Cannes 2011)

Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay has a strong Cannes pedigree. Her short film Small Deaths scooped the Prix de Jury in 1996 and she's since been back to the festival with Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar. After spending time working on a pre-Peter Jackson adaptation of The Lovely Bones, Ramsay is back from a nine-year cinema hiatus with We Need to Talk About Kevin. Based on Lionel Shriver's novel, she fashions an intense and harrowing drama about the shattered bond between mother and son.

We're introduced to Tilda Swinton's gaunt Eva as she discovers that her dilapidated home has been covered in red paint by vandals. Scrubbing away to clean up the mess, Ramsay cuts back in time to examine the hows and whys of her current plight. Eva was once married to Franklin (John C. Reilly) and they raised two children, Kevin (Ezra Miller) and Celia (Ashley Gerasimovich). Eva struggles to connect with Kevin as a baby and their fraught relationship continues through to his adolescence. Elliptical references to a high school tragedy are peppered throughout Kevin, lending the film a foreboding sense of dread.

This is a bleak and traumatic drama marked by a blistering performance from Swinton. The strains of raising a problem child take a physical toll on Eva. She's lively and vibrant but under constant torment from Kevin she buckles, eventually becoming a sunken-eyed pale shadow of her former self. Miller, too, is disturbing and powerful as Kevin, a character who makes Harry Enfield's moody teen of the same name look like an angel. There's subtle ambiguity in his performance, but by the end you may view him as a horror movie monster more evil than Damien. We Need to Talk About Kevin could well be in with a strong shout for this year's Palm d'Or, and after that an Oscar nomination for Tilda Swinton is almost a certainty.

> We Need to Talk About Kevin: In Pictures
> Lynne Ramsay: 'Tilda Swinton was ferocious'
> Cannes Film Festival complete coverage