Movies

This movie jumps around in time. Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton) is a hard-partying drifter in her youth. In the present, she lives a lonely haunted life with a hostile town around her. In between, she marries the permissive Franklin (John C. Reilly) and has a suburban life with two kids. Her first child is the troubled Kevin (Ezra Miller, Jasper Newell). She's not a happy mother and they struggle to get along. Then a troubling incident sends Kevin to prison.There is a lot of good acting in this. Tilda Swinton is good with her distancing. She shows that she's slightly troubled too. Ezra Miller is cold and scary. The movie doesn't go for the easy emotions. This is a haunted, cold and unsettling story. It's not a fun movie but it is a fascinating watch.

Trying to make this appear like an art-house experience, Lynne Ramsay not only fails to tell a promising story, but simply refuses to expose any true character motivation, senselessly disregards crucial plot devices and even deprives the movie of anything like a message or opinion. All this to make place for slow motion shots of several kinds of red substances over an awkward score while she cheaply generates tension by making her characters behave stupid for no obvious reason besides deliberately stressing the viewer (which makes the movie extremely hard to watch), striping this down to some odd melodrama about a woman who had an asshole child.