We Need to Talk About Kevin is about a nightmare on your street, not Elm Street. It’s a domestic horror story that literally gets to us where we live, a disturbing tale told with uncompromising emotionality and great skill by filmmaker Lynne Ramsay. Working from Lionel Shriver’s celebrated novel, Ramsay and her equally unflinching star, the mesmerizing Tilda Swinton, present a troubling, challenging examination of what Ramsay called “one of the last taboo subjects: You’re meant to instantly love your baby from the moment he’s born, but what if you don’t?” And what if that baby grows into someone terrifying? … On one level, Kevin tells a straightforward story of the relationship between mother Eva (Swinton) and her frighteningly manipulative son, Kevin, played as a toddler by Rocky Duer, as a boy by Jasper Newell and as a teenager by the unnerving Ezra Miller. But because Ramsay is an extraordinary evoker of visual mood, someone who seems to literally think and feel in images, Kevin functions on an expressionistic as well as a literal level, blending the real and the surreal as if there were no difference between them. Working with the gifted cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, Ramsay is incapable of creating ordinary images. Whether it’s the somehow disturbing visual of billowing white curtains that opens the film, later shots of Halloween revellers that have a spooky Diane Arbus feel or almost anything in between, Kevin’s ability to assemble textured visuals is its most potent attraction… If Eva did not want to be a mother, her child feels like someone who did not ask to be born. We watch in increasing disbelief as Kevin, as spiteful and adversarial as he is clever and calculating, engages in nihilistic combat with his mother as he goes from bad to badder to worst… What holds us in the film, besides Ramsay’s skill, is Swinton’s fearless, ferocious performance as someone not only trying to come to terms with an endless nightmare but also agonizing over what part she might have had in its creation.

Kenneth Turan, “Los Angeles Times”, 9 December 2011