The experience of Eva in We Need To Talk About Kevin is akin to that of a pumpkin come Halloween.
At first you are eviscerated, your soft innards pulped and trashed, an open-mouthed grimace is etched onto your face and then finally you become a passive bit-part player in some vast horror story.
Eva's numbing experience is shared, in some small way, by the audience.
For the success of this film about maternal guilt lies not in its relish of its gory subject matter - a High School killing spree by a devil-child - but in its muted, woozy restraint.
Director Lynne Ramsay may have touches of melodrama about her (red is a nagging theme, from tomatoes, paint and T-shirts to, of course, blood) but there is a welcome dearth of quick-fix manipulation.
The tale is stark and soulless, the events unremittingly cold and the aftermath devoid of joy. Enough said.
Ramsay embarks upon the life of Kevin as a series of fragments, jigsaw memories from a mother left scrabbling for clues as to the genesis of her satanic offspring.
As Kevin languishes in jail, Eva is left to clean up the mess, literally and figuratively.
She takes the hatred of a grieving community as her necessary punishment as she wrestles with the extent of her culpability.
Hollow-eyed and flayed, she shuffles through her life perplexed by the cruelty her son visited upon her but instinctively inclined to take the blame as her own.
For as Kevin grows from toddler to teen, his wilful manipulations move from stubborn provocation to an unsettling dark flirtation and Eva is disturbed by her complicity.
Ezra Miller as the older Kevin embodies this sly, oily arrogance with sinuous grace and the scenes he shares with Tilda Swinton's Eva - vampire kid versus zombie mum - are laden with menace.
Eva's isolation is only reinforced by the ignorant complacency of Kevin's patsy father (John C Reilly) who recognises only good in his children and a pitiable resentment in a wife who exchanged a successful career for dismal snot-wrangling.
Ramsay has created a coherent collage from the best-selling book by Lionel Shriver.
Haunting images abound; the abrasive sound design creates the theme music to the banality of evil; and Swinton's hallucinatory nightmare is what "numb with shock" should look like.
This is not an easy watch - it never could be - but Ramsay has made the unpalatable delectable, which is an extraordinary feat.
– From October 2011
