We Need to Talk About Kevin doesn’t waste much time. From the start, we know that its title character is a murderer, moreover, that he’s responsible for a school massacre, something that’s become the new national nightmare. Its angle on the tragedy is one not often considered: The mother, who navigates through life in a permanent state of shock. It’s not so much that she didn’t expect what Kevin did to happen. On the contrary, she was suspicious of him as a toddler. What gets to her isn’t the decrepitude of her new home, the hopelessness of her new job, or even the open hostility of the neighborhood, but the knowledge that she was utterly powerless to stop the inevitable. (more…)