Okay, here’s what Eva and Franklin (Tilda Swinton and John C Reilly) need to talk about – how they ended up with a Eurasian kid (Ezra Miller; as a child, Rock Duer and Jasper Newell). Clearly there was a maternity hospital swapsie and they accidentally ended up with a sociopathic, high-school-massacring cuckoo. Where’s Angelina Jolie when you need her?
Eva’s subjectivity complicates the central question of Lionel Shriver’s source novel – whether Kevin is innately evil, or Eva’s ambivalent mothering nurtured his monstrosity. Lynne Ramsay’s film represents Eva’s torturous soul-searching in a lurid, nightmarish way, both in wistful memories of Eva’s life before Kevin and unsettling, retrospectively portentous ones of their battle of wills. As if in further penance, Eva stoically endures the hatred of her leafy community, whose golden children Kevin slew.
Ramsay’s heavy-handed use of ironic visual/soundtrack juxtapositions and allegorical imagery tip the film into melodrama, reminding me of I Am Love, also starring Swinton. Eva flirts with Franklin in the rain, but sprinklers offer a more sinister soaking; she echoes Kevin’s repulsive nail-biting by picking eggshells from mouthfuls of omelette. And both Eva’s tomato-throwing travel memories and her cleaning an anonymous vandal’s red paint from her verandah evoke her Lady Macbeth-style ‘bloody hands’.
In cinemas November 17
WIN
Thanks to Hopscotch, we have 10 dbls to give away! To enter, email
brisbane.win@thethousands.com.au with the subject ‘swapped at the hospital’
Australian Competitions Club
