I just got back from seeing We Need To Talk About Kevin.

I’ve always absolutely loved Tilda Swinton, and here I think she gave another Oscar-worthy performance. I felt every moment of her emotions, really desperately wanting to help her. She flawlessly transitions from the hope-filled mother of an innocent newborn, to the depressed mother of a murderous psychopath. There’s something about her that’s just enchanting to watch. So genuine and brutal in her performance. She definitely deserves awards.

A friend criticised the film as being too ‘artsy’ before I’d seen it, so I was expecting to agree with him. Actually, I really liked the style of its directing. The narrative intertwines and flicks back and forth along the timeline, linking it through juxtaposition and dichotomising of emotion and sensation. It compliments Swinton’s performance, adds to the disaster and hopelessness of the film, and makes it, at times, incredibly difficult viewing.

I don’t really have any criticisms of it. There are a couple of things I would have done differently, and some of the sequences were, I thought, a little bit pretentious and unnecessary, but the outstanding quality of the film as a whole means I can easily overlook them as just not being quite to my taste.

It’s always difficult to construct a film around delicate subject matter - in this case, a school massacre - without risking generating some sort of sympathy for the killer. Here, it’s managed with such poise and delicacy that all your emotions end up conflicting over Swinton’s character, seeing Kevin as more of an offshoot of her broken psyche than a character to be adored or abhorred in his own right.

Overall, I’d recommend it to all film-lovers. Some people might be put off by its artsy qualities. Others probably will struggle to engage with its staggered narrative. I, however, loved it: a really engaging, devastating and captivating film experience.