Tilda Swinton leads real-life horror story in We Need To Talk About Kevin
By James Brady RyanNovember 1st, 2011, 11:30 amComments (21)Remember yesterday, when I hoped that The Innkeepers would be an actually scary, well-made horror film but was sadly informed that it actually wasn't very good by one of our commenters? Maybe We Need To Talk About Kevin, the upcoming film starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly based on the book of the same name, can fill the void created yesterday. Because if this trailer is any indication, it's like The Omen but without the Antichrist. Rosemary's Baby without the Satanic cult. Three Men and a Little Lady but without two of the men or the little lady plus one woman and a maladjusted teenager driven to commit an unspeakable act of violence:
The film is directed by Lynne Ramsay, the woman behind Morvern Callar and Ratcatcher, which gives it good directing pedigree on top of its stellar leading actors. It opens in a limited release in December, but it's been burning up the film festival circuit, so perhaps it will make the jump to a wider distribution. We didn't get any real good scares in the multiplexes this Halloween (sorry, Paranormal Activity 3), but between this film and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, maybe we can have a big-screen Christmas full of terrifying human monsters. Joy to the world!
Commentarium (21 Comments)
I saw it at Telluride this year, and it is pretty amazing. I have a lot of difficulty characterizing it as an actual horror film, but I will say that it made me supremely physically uncomfortable. Watching it is a very visceral experience, hammered home by the fact that Lynne Ramsay was a photographer before she started making films, so the composition of every scene is almost startling in a way. I kind of can't wait to see it again, and while it does have shades of "The Omen" or "Rosemary's Baby", there is no talk of the supernatural (which actually made it scarier for me).
Addendum--not to say that horror films have to have an element of the supernatural. What I meant was the plausibility of this made it more horrifying.
I don't know, I've read some pretty middling reviews of it.
Now you say something