An introspective family melodrama drawing from a long tradition stretching from Oedipus Rex to Mildred Pierce, Ramsay's latest film is, like these predecessors, ultimately a turbulent love story, a dark romance between a painfully self-conscious mother and her precocious son. Yanking up the tangled roots of the gnarled family tree, We Need to Talk About Kevin makes painfully clear the psychosexual burdens passed back and forth across generations while asking profoundly difficult questions about the crushing expectations that weigh relentlessly upon mothers. Tilda Swinton has justly received unanimous praise for her fearlessness portrayal of a woman whose life, career and worldview is exploded and deranged by her traumatic realization that her son is nothing less than a demon child, capable of unthinkable, monstrous acts. Equally impressive is Ramsay's transformation of upper middle class yuppie-dom into a menacing surface world, gleaming with sharp edges and innuendo. A brilliant visual storyteller, Ramsay unites the film's complex time structure by revealing a frightening symmetry between Swinton's past and present, legible in a series of mirrored images that use bold color and rhymed compositions to trace the tortured path of mistakes twice made. Shocking to the core, We Need to Talk About Kevin is ultimately a film of careful restraint, with Ramsay using uncanny sounds and off-screen space to wrap a dark malevolence around everyday objects and spaces. – HG