December 6, 2011 -- Movies don't usually give me nightmares. This one did. After watching this, I dreamed a guy was trying to kill me with a meat cleaver. There are no meat cleavers in this movie, but there is a very scary teenage mass killer and he puts his mom through hell for about 20 years. Any woman thinking about becoming a mother will have second thoughts about that after watching this movie.

Tilda Swinton (“The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”) plays Eva, the mother of a psychopath, Kevin, who torments her from birth, despite her best efforts to raise him right, and continues to torment her, even after he goes on a killing spree at the local high school. Inspired by the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, the novel of the same name by Lionel Shriver was made into this film by Lynne Ramsay, who also co-wrote the screenplay.

Kevin is played by Ezra Miller (he is also played at an earlier age by child actor Jasper Newell and at an even earlier age by child actor Rock Duer). All three actors do a great job playing this creepy, malevolent child who grows into a killer. The early part of the movie is tough to watch as Eva gives birth to this hell spawn who screams incessantly from birth, is slow to learn to talk, slow to learn to use a potty, yet quick to learn the most effective ways to torment his mother. In one scene, Kevin so infuriates his mother she throws him against a wall and breaks his arm. Kevin doesn't cry. Instead, he calculatingly uses this incident as leverage against his mother to get away with even more bad behavior.

When Eva becomes pregnant again, Kevin is angry. He wants to be an only child. When his sister, Lucy (Ursula Parker) is born, Kevin resents the attention she gets from her parents, Eva and Franklin (John C. Reilly of “Cedar Rapids”). You just know something bad is going to happen to Lucy. While Kevin is bad, Lucy is a sweet kid. Kevin, however is able to completely hide his evil nature from his father, who has no clue what he is really like. When Eva accuses Kevin of hurting his sister and killing her pet, Franklin blames Eva. In fact, Eva gets blamed for everything. She bears the sins of her son forever. In this movie, it is like the Taliban are in charge of things.

Kevin is a very unusual person. He has no sympathy for people. He likes to torment his sister and mother, but treats his father well. He has what is known as cognitive empathy. He knows how to get inside people's heads. He can figure out what other people are feeling and use that against them, but at the same time, he has no emotional empathy. He doesn't care if he hurts or kills people. He kills not because he is particularly angry at people in school. He just wants the notoriety. He also gives no warning to anyone about his acts of murders. He keeps it a secret.

He is a mass killer who falls outside the FBI behavioral profile of a school shooter in that there are no warning signs, no history of bullying at school, or being a victim of bullying, no threats, no signs of frustration with schoolmates, no fantasies expressed in blogs or stories about violence, what the FBI calls “leakage” of violent thoughts into expressive behaviors. Kevin's murder spree violates one of the fundamental principles of violience threat assessment developed by the U.S. Secret Service. That is, that the attacks are relatively unpredictable and spontaneous. Kevin's attacks contrast sharply with notorious real life killers whose behavior raised a lot of warning flags prior to their attacks. He is a mass killer who also kills people in his own immediate family as well as classmates, two very different groups that are not usually combined this way.

As you can tell, I did some research on this subject of school shootings because a number of things in this movie don't add up from a psychological standpoint. I wanted to see if Kevin's behavior squares with real life. It doesn't. I'm not saying that what happened in this movie is impossible. It probably is possible. I've just never heard of anything like this happening the way it happens in this movie. The closest thing to Kevin is another movie character, Damien from “The Omen,” a boy who is born evil, but is able to conceal it until it is too late to stop him. In a sense, then, this movie is kind of like a horror, or science fiction film in the guise of being a story about real life.

The essense of the story is about the “nature versus nurture” debate. In that case, Kevin's nature trumps the loving care his mother tries to give him. She is not a perfect mother, but she goes above and beyond the call of motherly duty to raise the boy right. It is like Kevin was programmed to kill and Eva is unable to change that killing software he was born with. I don't see that Eva had much of a choice, except to turn herself in to the authorities for breaking her son's arm, or kill Kevin herself. What kind of a choice is that? That makes the story somewhat misogynistic. Not only does she have no control over what happens, she is blamed for everything that happens by her community, despite the fact that she is more of a victim than anyone else in the whole affair.

Eva is victimized by everyone. In one scene, a family member of one of Kevin's murder victims hits her hard in the face. She stoically takes the punishment, saying she deserves it. Eva is a very passive character, quietly absorbing punishment from Kevin and from the family members of Kevin's victims. She passively absorbs a terrible insult from a co-worker rather than give him the punch in the nose he deserves. This is the kind of behavior you might expect from a woman in a society run by the Taliban, not the kind of thing you expect to see in America, and not what you expect to see from Tilda Swinton, an actress known for playing assertive women. This seems like an exercise in misogyny. There is one delightful moment in the film, however, when Eva says something darkly comic to a couple of Mormon missionaries.

This is a movie that is tough to watch. It is well-acted, especially by Swinton and the boys who play Kevin, who do such a fine job playing such an evil character. The structure of the story, with its numerous flashbacks works well most of the time. The major problems I had with this movie is that it is very unpleasant to watch and it doesn't really make sense from a psychological standpoint. I would be more willing to suspend my disbelief if the movie didn't drag me through this kind of stupid psychological deterministic slime. While I do admire the filmmaking craft that went into it, the experience of watching it is less than satisfying. It rates a C.

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Copyright © 2011 Robert Roten. All rights reserved.
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