[Mother of Fears] The Uneasy Road of Motherhood in We Need to Talk About Kevin

Welcome to Mother of Fears – a monthly column that will explore the various roles that mothers play within the horror genre. Mothers are a staple feature in horror movies, and yet, their stories, motivations, representations, and relationships with their children are so varied and complex that we never feel like we’re watching the same story twice. Every month I will take a look at a different mother from the world of horror, explore their story, and look at how they fit into the broader representation of women in horror.

Being a mother isn’t always easy, but for Eva in We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), being a mother sees her entire life sucked away from her, so all that’s left is her son, Kevin.

Eva never wanted to get pregnant with Kevin. She is a successful travel writer, seen in the opening moments of the movie writhing around in a sea of people and tomatoes at La Tomatina, the tomato festival in Spain. With time apart from her partner, Franklin, proving difficult, he asks her to promise to never leave him behind again as they engage in some unprotected loving making, which results in Kevin, meaning Eva waves goodbye to her life as she knows it. 

Franklin seems over the moon about the pregnancy from the beginning, but then, his life doesn’t seem to change very much at all. He still gets to go to work as a photographer, leaving Eva and Kevin in each other's company for the majority of the day. Eva never really embraces motherhood. She attends a pregnancy yoga class where other mothers flaunt their bumps proudly, while she hides in oversized clothing. Her midwife accuses her of resisting while she’s in labour, and in the moments following Kevin’s birth, Eva looks disconnected and disillusioned rather than blissful and relaxed. 

Eva’s apparent lack of maternal instinct means she’s open to criticism from the outside world from the start. Walking through the city in a bid to rock Kevin to sleep leads to judgemental looks from other women at her inability to soothe her child. Workmen stare in disbelief as she appears to embrace the constant noise of a jackhammer, which is considerably less annoying than Kevin’s non-stop screaming. 

One of the main problems in Eva’s life is the lack of support she gets from Franklin, which is something that only gets worse as Kevin gets older, especially when he can twist this weakness to his advantage. Eva spends the entire day trying to soothe Kevin, only for Franklin to dismiss her concerns and immediately pick him up to play when he returns home from work. Kevin is a lot calmer in Franklin’s company, and so, he comes to believe that the problem is with Eva’s mothering rather than anything wrong with his son. Even after reaching out for medical help, she’s told there is nothing wrong with Kevin, leaving her stuck to deal with this problem by herself. 

Kevin appears to actively make things difficult for his mother, refusing to speak or play with her when she asks him to and remaining in nappies far longer than expected. While Franklin may not see it, we witness Eva trying incredibly hard to bond with Kevin and bring out his best side. But even from a young age, he seems to know how to push her buttons. 

The only moments which Franklin witnesses are ones such as Eva telling Kevin how much happier she was before he was born. “Mommy was happy before Kevin came along. Now she wakes up every morning and wishes she was in France!”

Seemingly determined to remove any level of comfort Eva has in life, Franklin suggests they move to a house in the suburbs because Kevin is only a child once and his wants and needs are the most important. While giving Kevin the things he needs when he’s growing up is obviously vital, Franklin does not consider meeting Eva’s needs. For him, building the picture-perfect suburban life is the answer to all his problems, and he can’t see why Eva wouldn’t want to be along for the ride.

Eva decides to cope with her growing isolation by carving out a space of her own in the sterile house that Franklin has picked for them. Using vintage maps and old travel mementoes, she decorates her office, telling Kevin it’s important to have somewhere where you can reflect your personality. However, Kevin brands them dumb, and the first chance he gets, he splatters the walls with his water pistol filled with paint.

He may be young at this point, but the way Kevin waits for a reaction from his mother suggests that this is far more than a childhood mistake. While he manages to convince his father that he only wanted to make his mother’s room more special, it’s clear he’s determined to strip her of anything which brings her joy in life. Now every time she tries to escape to her own private space, the walls will remind her of Kevin’s hateful personality rather than her own. 

The breaking point in their relationship comes when Kevin soils his nappy twice in quick succession to annoy his mother as much as possible. Finally, at the end of her tether, she tries to lift Kevin onto the changing table and ends up throwing him across the room, breaking his arm. 

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While Kevin lies to the doctor and his father about the circumstances surrounding the broken arm, he likes to casually stroke the scar whenever he needs to remind his mother who is really in control. However, he does miraculously manage to toilet train himself after the incident. While he never intends to let his mother forget the power he holds over her, it’s clear he’s impressed that she stood up to him. Finally admitting he can use the toilet is partly a reward for Eva’s behaviour, but it also shows that perhaps Kevin isn’t willing to push his mother in the same circumstances again, for fear of what will happen.

When Eva gets pregnant the second time with her daughter, Celia, both she and Kevin sense that things are going to be different. Eva goes into this pregnancy more excited, perhaps seeing it as a second chance to get things right, and hopefully have a child that will reciprocate her feelings. The amount of work she has put into caring for Kevin is exhausting, and to get nothing in return while watching him fake a loving relationship with his father must be heart-breaking. 

The pregnancy also puts a strain on her relationship with Franklin, who doesn’t even notice she’s pregnant until Kevin calls her fat. He’s annoyed that he wasn’t part of the decision-making process, which is rich considering how little consideration he’s given to what Eva has wanted throughout their relationship. 

We do get to see a sliver of what life could have been like for Eva and Kevin when she finds him lying ill on the floor one day. After cleaning him up and taking him to bed, he apologises for vomiting on the floor, and cuddles into Eva as she reads him a story. He even dismisses his father, only caring about the undivided attention of his mother. Perhaps he didn’t realise how much he needed Eva before Celia came along, but now that he’s having to share her things are a little different. However, while this scene could be read as heartwarming, it has darker hints of what’s to come as they read about Robin Hood together. 

Even when he’s older, Kevin can’t cope with the way Eva feels about Celia. Whether it’s out of pure jealously, or because he knows how much it will hurt Eva, he does things such as tie Celia up, call her stupid, kill her guinea pig, and get drain cleaner in her eye, causing her to need a glass eye. From the way he speaks to Eva, it’s clear he wants to be accepted as a clever grown-up, but the way he fights for attention with his little sister is nothing but pure childishness.

The story is told through time jumps, shifting from Eva’s old life with her family to her current life living alone in a much smaller, unkempt house. We know Kevin is in jail, as Eva regularly visits him, but it’s not until the end of the movie we find out the reason for his incarceration. After growing more skilled at firing a bow and arrow throughout his teenage years, a love affair which started with the Robin Hood book Eva read to him, Kevin heads into his school and murders a bunch of his classmates. 

Eva rushes to the scene after hearing of the attack, waiting with the other worried parents on the sidelines until Kevin is revealed as the attacker. For Eva, it’s one final embarrassment, as Kevin smugly watches on as she tries to make sense of it all in her head. As the dead and injured teenagers begin to roll out, Eva is left to deal with it alone. A moment before she was among peers and now she is seen as on the side of the enemy. 

Returning home, Eva finds that Kevin had murdered Franklin and Celia before heading to school that morning. My only hope is that Franklin realised that Eva was right about everything before he died and that every interaction he’d had with his son was constructed by Kevin to make them seem like a happy family. 

In the end, Kevin has left Eva with nothing. He could have killed her in the morning too, but instead, he let her leave for work. He took Celia away because it was clear that Eva loved her far more than she did Kevin. And once he had killed his sister and his schoolmates, there was no way for Kevin to keep up the perfect image his father had of him, so it made sense to kill him as well. 

Kevin knew that Eva and Franklin were on the verge of getting a divorce, and that chances are he would end up living with his dad. Instead of allowing Eva to finally be free of him, he made sure that it was only the two of them left. Eva has always known what he was like, and now she’s proven right in the worst possible way. 

It is revealed that while their relationship has never been the best, Eva used all her money and even lost her house ensuring he had the best defence possible. This behaviour has led to her being hated in town, with people regularly confronting and assaulting her. When she finds another high school mother has smashed all her eggs at the supermarket, Eva buys them anyway, making herself possibly the worst plate of scrambled eggs I’ve ever seen. Eva believes that she deserves this punishment on some level. Whether it’s because she wants to give these parents the outlet for their rage that she never got from those around her, or simply because she wants to punish herself for any part she may have played in the outcome, it’s not clear. 

While leaving her office one day, Eva runs into the mother of a dead high school student who shouts “Looks like someone’s having a nice day”, before slapping her. Once again, Eva accepts this punishment almost without flinching. Those who pass her assume her life is fine, mostly because her child is still alive, and the fact she chose to stand by him. However, it’s impossible for them to comprehend the effect that Kevin has had on her life, not just on the day of the massacre, but for the past 18 years. 

We see very little of Kevin’s attack on-screen, but Eva’s life is constantly bathed in red because of that day and her life with Kevin. In the present, Eva’s house is paint bombed, and while she spends most of the film trying to clean it off, she spends many nights lying in bed with a red hue enveloping the room. When she finds Franklin and Celia’s bodies in the back garden, she stumbles into the house covered in their blood, her once white dress now stained red. 

The tomato soup cans she hides in front of in the supermarket, the paint Kevin splatters her office walls with, the red ball he refused to roll back to her, the blob of ketchup on the side of her shell-laden eggs, her blood-stained hands as she covers up the death of Celia’s guinea pig, the red wine she drinks in large measures, and even the flashing bedside clock that illuminates Eva and Franklin’s tense late-night conversations. Eva cannot escape the tinges of red that Kevin has brought into her life. The anger, the hatred, the strained years, and the literal blood caused by Kevin are all represented in this ever-present colour. Eva was bathed in red as she swam through the sea of tomatoes in Spain in her pre-Kevin life, but now, even that memory is tinged by the screams of Kevin’s schoolmates in the aftermath of what he did. 

Near the end of the movie, Kevin is getting ready to move to an adult prison for the rest of his sentence. Eva has recreated his room perfectly in her new modest home, implying that once he gets released, she will once again welcome him into her life. 

Much like when he was ill as a child, this is the first time we see Kevin afraid and actively seeking his mother’s attention. It’s almost as though he likes to pretend he doesn’t need her and does everything possible to drive her away, but even in the worst circumstances she proves that she’s still there for him, and he’s glad she is. 

He hugs her as they part, terrified of what being moved to an adult prison will mean for him. Despite his need to be taken seriously, he has always acted like a spoiled child who is better than everyone else. Thrown into prison with adult criminals, he will no longer be the golden boy. In the closing moments of the movie, he finally gets a dose of reality and sees that his mother is the only person who will truly always be there for him. 

No one would blame Eva for walking away from Kevin, but she is still there, trying to be the mother he needs, even though he’s taken literally everything from her. She may not have always felt undying love for her son, but she’s always tried to do what was best for him, even at the expense of her own happiness 

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