The
striking opening image of We Need to Talk About Kevin, a birds’ eye view of an
army of bodies writhing in a sea of crushed tomatoes (we may wonder if
it’s blood at first), lets us know more than we may suspect about the film. This
chaos of red, with its stumbling and slithering human forms, is an image out of
time and space; we don’t know where we are, or when this is happening, or if
it’s even real. It’s probably the “Tomatina” festival in Valencia, and since
our lead character Eva (Tilda Swinton) is a travel agent, this is probably an
event she’s been to at some point in her mangled life. But still. We know
everything about the feel of the thing and nothing about the why, or the how,
or the when, or even the who. That seems to be a good way to describe Lynne
Ramsay’s cinema in general. This one, however, stands out.
