We Need to Talk About Kevin is a Psychological thriller directed by Lynne Ramsey. The film follows Eva (Tilda Swinton) who is struggling to connect with her son Kevin (Ezra Miller), the film at its core is really about Eva and Kevin’s relationship, most of the film is spent showing us the struggle Eva goes through to bond with her son. She starts noticing increasingly dangerous behaviour which ends up leading to a mass shooting at his high school.
Throughout the movie, we flick between 3 different points of Eva’s life. The first being before she had a family and kids, she has aspirations of being a writer and a world traveller. The second is when she settled down with her husband and Kevin and her daughter is born, the final perspective being after the school shooting committed by Kevin.
The sound design for this movie is quite spectacular, it does a great job of putting you in the perspective of Eva and also uses lots of interesting tricks to play with the viewer. The opening of this movie has some interesting sound design choices. The film opens with a panning shot of an open door at night with a curtain obscuring the view of what’s behind. We hear a sprinkler noise which is used as a recurring motif throughout the movie, this creates a very uncomfortable atmosphere. Even though we do not know what happened the way the sound of the sprinkler and the panning shot is used lets us know something bad has happened.
We Need To Talk About Kevin inspired me by its use of taking average mundane noises like the sprinkler motif throughout the film and making them scary and uncomfortable. I have not chosen my film as of yet but am thinking of working in surreal horror and the use of field recordings to create horror in this film really clicked with me, and is going to be something I think about when I start creating my work.