Essay: ‘Kevin’ and ‘Undefeated’ and the wages of solitude

“Here it is, guys. Our very own castle.”

Those offhanded but pointedly fateful words are spoken by John C. Reilly in “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” Lynne Ramsay’s bold, unnerving adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s 2003 novel.

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Reilly plays Franklin, a good-natured husband and father who is showing his wife Eva (Tilda Swinton) and their young son Kevin (Jasper Newell) a sprawling new house he’s purchased in the suburbs. Eva, a free spirit and committed Manhattanite, is clearly discomfited by the sterile, too-perfect pseudo-mansion, which in the course of the film never loses the polished gleam of a stage set. True to her misgivings, carnage both metaphorical and literal will ensue in the wake of the family’s rustication — most of it hidden behind the house’s clipped greensward of a lawn, at least until it reaches a point of explosive, tragic critical mass.

Although “We Need to Talk About Kevin” focuses on Eva’s story — given steely life by Swinton’s haunted, uncompromising performance — it’s Franklin’s words about the castle that have taken on new meaning over the past few days, first when news broke about a fatal high school shooting in Chardon, Ohio, and then while watching a documentary called “Undefeated.”

Anyone familiar with the plot of Shriver’s novel recognizes the eerie coincidence of “We Need to Talk About Kevin” opening just days after the Ohio shooting, which claimed three lives and for which a 17-year-old student named T.J. Lane has been charged. But fans of of the book also know that Shriver’s rigorous, lucid, searingly perceptive story is about school violence the same way “Moby Dick” is about fishing. As Ramsay’s graphic, almost abstract adaptation makes clear, Eva’s story — which pivots around her failure to bond with Kevin as an infant — becomes inevitably tangled up in ambivalence, shame and self-deception.

It’s precisely that sense of self-deception that Franklin embodies when he buys the family “castle,” in the hopes that the signs of trouble that Kevin has been evincing as a child — the lack of empathy, the manipulativeness, the almost pathological defiance — are simply symptoms of cramped New York life. Like so many jaded urban dwellers, he’s convinced that once he, Eva and Kevin decamp for more bucolic climes, their hard-wired natures will follow suit.

Instead, the cavernous, light-filled house where most of the psychic warfare takes place in “We Need to Talk About Kevin” becomes a looming symbol of Eva’s isolation. And her aloneness begins to assume the contours of quiet desperation as she tries in vain to get Franklin to acknowledge the emotional problems bedevilling Kevin, played as a creepy, cold-eyed teenager by Ezra Miller. With no neighbors nearby or friends to speak of, Eva is almost completely on her own throughout the movie, which grows in its sense of dread as Eva fights a futile battle to have her reality validated.

The picture of Eva’s solitary suffering was what came back so strongly as details of the Ohio shooting emerged, especially regarding T.J. Lane’s life with his grandparents. By all accounts, Lane enjoyed a warm and loving home with the elderly couple. But their family occasionally veered into crisis, with the couple sometimes calling the police to help them with T.J.’s troubled older brother. If filmgoers watch “We Need to Talk About Kevin” through the lens of this past week’s news, they may find themselves reflecting on whether anyone can ever know what’s going on behind neatly painted doors and manicured lawns.