We Need To Talk About Tilda's Oscar

When we first see Tilda Swinton in We Need To Talk About Kevin, we see her swimming through a symbolic sea of red during a tomato festival where everyone's red drenched fleshes are pressing in on one another in mass chaos and her haunting body above and floating through the crowd in a sort of sacrificial ecstasy, not unlike familiar portrayals of Jesus himself or Maria Falconetti's iconic performance in The Passion of Joan of Arc.

From that point forward the film jumps back and forth through bold editing between her life in the present and her life before leading up to this point. We see her in the beginning as a young woman with soulful passion and a joyful yearning to live and experience a hopeful life. Cut to the present day and you see a haunting shell of a woman completely beat down and ground to a pulp; rock bottom, left for dead, nothing left to look forward to, in an absolute pit of despair. She seems quite pleased to imagine that if there is a God she will go straight down to hell, because, really, how much could the physical inflictions of hell effect her to the profound point where she already is in her life right now?

We follow her journey leading up to what led her to this point with a performance as bold and daring and courageous and provocative as the material lent to her. Tilda, a proud mother herself in her personal life, went forth with a brute honesty in her character's disgust for pregnancies, the violence of childbirth, and a failure to ever connect with her own child from the start before commencing a sequence of maddening and thought provoking events raising the challenging notion of the nightmare scenario of parenting — what if everything (that possibly could go wrong) goes wrong? What if you really truly just happen to bear a monster? In this psychological horror the natural questions then arise of how much that child is a reflection of her, and how much of her she sees in this monster.

Year after year goes by whence Tilda slowly destroys and dismantles and collapses her character of Eva once brimming with hopes and passions and livelihood into the woman we see in the second half until the pivotal moment of the plot finally arrives where anything she's ever known more or less wipes out. Without giving too much away, this doesn't happen until the end, but it makes us seeing her in that barren state of unimaginably lonely and painful and guilt-ridden existence in her specially subtle and layered performance in particular all the more powerful upon retrospect and demanding of repeated viewing.