Cannes 2011: Lynne Ramsay’s We Need To Talk About Kevin

I know, we’re a little bit late with this one, but you’ll forgive us. We Need To Talk About Kevin is the upcoming Lynne Ramsay’s indie drama that we’ll have a chance to see among the 19 films screening In Competition at this year’s Cannes Film festival.

Definitely an interesting project that is actually an adaptation of Lionel Shriver‘s prize-winning book of the same name, which is already being described as a “powerful, controversial novel about motherhood.”

Co-scripted by Ramsay and writer Rob Festinger, the movie follows Kevin and his mother, Eva. After Kevin goes on a killing spree just days before his 16th birthday, Eva is forced to question whether she ever loved her son and how much she is to blame for what he did.

Movie stars Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly, and just in case you’re interested in more details here’s a little description of the novel:

“Eva Khatchadourian is a smart, skeptical New Yorker whose impulsive marriage to Franklin, a much more conventional person, bears fruit, to her surprise and confessed disquiet, in baby Kevin. From the start Eva is ambivalent about him, never sure if she really wanted a child, and he is balefully hostile toward her; only good-old-boy Franklin, hoping for the best, manages to overlook his son’s faults as he grows older, a largely silent, cynical, often malevolent child.

The later birth of a sister who is his opposite in every way, deeply affectionate and fragile, does nothing to help, and Eva always suspects his role in an accident that befalls little Celia. The narrative, which leads with quickening and horrifying inevitability to the moment when Kevin massacres seven of his schoolmates and a teacher at his upstate New York high school, is told as a series of letters from Eva to an apparently estranged Franklin, after Kevin has been put in a prison for juvenile offenders….”

The Cannes Film Festival begins on May 11th. Stay tuned!

Tilda Swinton in We Need To Talk About Kevin