We Need to Talk about Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, 2011)

Based on Lionel Shriver's novel, We Need to Talk about Kevin features the stand-out performance you know Tilda Swinton has in her but which seldom surfaces amidst all the wilfully quirky or perverse roles she chooses. She is the mother of a boy who she tries to love and who in return plays his parents against each other from earliest infancy with an eerily manipulative intellect and complete lack of emotional involvement. The story holds its cards close to its chest, leaving the viewer guessing as to whether we're dealing with an autist or a sociopath, and shows occasional flashes which turn out to be false dawns in his development which bring us in as much as they bring the beleaguered parents hope.
It moves forward with a heavy reliance on time dislocation as a technique, Swinton's haircut changes initially the only reliable beacon to indicate the timeframe of the moment, but for once the overused device isn't just a modish trick: it underlines the unreliable nature of a single perspective's memory and thereby the gap between the past as we'd like to see it and how it really was. When the denouement comes, making a claim for relevance in a topical event context, it has been built up logically and therefore convinces.

7/10