Two quite different films are simultaneously on show in Lynne Ramsay's much-praised adaptation of Lionel Shriver's 2003 novel: which one you see will depend on whether you've read the book or not.
Anyone who has shivered through the pages of the original novel will know it presents a prodigious challenge to a film-maker, which perhaps explains why this project spent five years in development. Employing an epistolary format - the entire novel is a series of letters written by a woman to her apparently estranged husband - it reveals the horror at its heart only slowly, although the gut starts knotting around the mid-point.
Shriver was concerned with more than the genesis of the title character's climactic actions. Her story was a nuanced rumination on something more universally and literally unspeakable: what happens when a mother does not love her child.
I don't doubt that Ramsay, a Scot whose earlier features Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar announced a film-maker of real skill, was aware of these deeper echoes, but her film quite ignores them, serving up instead an ingratiating and self-consciously arty piece of Grand Guignol (a ludicrous Halloween scene is right out of Wes Craven). From the first scene in which Eva (Swinton) is seen (in crucifixion pose, of course) in a swamp of red at the famous tomato festival in Spain, the film lays on the blood symbolism with a trowel. See Eva in the tomato soup aisle at the supermarket; watch Kevin (Miller) make a jam sandwich.
The unfolding story, told in a jarringly fragmentary fashion, becomes a long catalogue of scenes involving the toddler/kid/teenager from hell, interspersed with moments from the climax's aftermath: he manages everything from withholding his bowel motions until just the wrong time and masturbating when he knows his mother will see. In case the glazed and affectless expression in his eyes were not enough, Kevin's dad (Reilly) buys him an archery set. Ramsay at least has the restraint not to insert an intertitle saying "uh-oh".
