Tilda Swinton turns in a spectacular performance as a smart, ambitious career woman with a teen son who massacres the students at his high school a la Columbine. In her guilt and confusion she’s left to grapple with the extent of her responsibility—or maybe there is none and Kevin is just a bad seed, spawn of the devil. Indeed, in the hands of director Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher), the movie at times becomes suffused with the eeriness of Repulsion or an art house Omen, as Kevin becomes uncomfortably Other. If you’re looking for a smart movie that offers no easy answers, this movie is for you. Played the Telluride and Toronto film festivals.


“There are many great things happening on almost every level of this movie, from Swinton's haunting, magnetic and tremendously vulnerable performance, which is absolutely free of condescension to the suburban American wife-ness of her character, to the many unsettling individual moments.”—Andrew O’Hehir, Salon

“Moviegoers seek out a film like Kevin for the experience of a top-flight director taking complete charge of a fractured, intricate narrative design and a top-flight actress at the peak of her game.”—Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter

“Cinema's worst ever case of post-natal depression is the subject of this compelling psycho-horror nightmare from Lynne Ramsay...It is a movie which is a skin-peelingly intimate character study and a brilliantly nihilist, feminist parable: what happens when smart progressive career women give birth to boys: the smirking, back-talking, weapon-loving competitive little beasts that they have feared and despised since their own schooldays?”—Peter Bradshaw, Guardian (UK)