We Need To Talk About Kevin; Family Death Scene

Scene 1:
Family death scene (Flashback)

The death of of Eva's family is a prime example to show how flash backs are used to portray the feelings and also potentially provide a red herring or foresee the future. This scene starts with a long, slow pan up to the curtains, with non-diegetic sounds, such as scratchy violins. The noises used are to put the audience on edge, as they are commonly signified within horror films. Just before reaching the curtains, the screen becomes heavily over exposed, again, another convention for flashbacks. This creates parallelism, as the flashback goes back to something at the beginning of the film, a large food fight. However,  the colour of the tomatoes and food is red. The meanings love and danger can be denoted from the colour red, both of which are relevant with what the audience is about to see; making this flashback a foreshadow, as subsequently, Kevin has killed the other people that Eva loves within her family.

The demographic isn't subconsciously aware of what the flashbacks offer in terms of understanding the narrative, as well as the importance of them. As i mentioned, the narrative allows the audience to work out what is about to happen. However, this is not always the case, as sometimes the flashbacks offer a red herring, leading the audience in a different direction. The audience later feels gratified... in a horrific way, as they now see the curtains again, but rather than stopping at that, it cuts to still medium  shots of Eva's family with arrows in them. The diegetic water sprinklers now replace the violins, and speed up once the audience sees the deceased characters. This effect speeds. up the heart rate, making the audience feel even more tension, emphasising the importance as to what they have just witnessed.

The film does not work in a chronological order. The scene the I have chosen is a prime example, as it conveys how Eva is in between the two time spans. The protagonist has now developed and is living in a new, small home. There is a flash forward to the death scene, but then a flashback, to before the time at which she is in now. Yet the more the audience watches, the more they are able to place bits of this fractured narrative together, to create a, some what, chronological narrative.


The use of flashbacks and parallelism in the structure of the film can be usefully explored. The film begins in the aftermath of the massacre, then flashes back to the events leading up to it (including flashbacks to the beginnings of Franklin and Eva’s relationship). The complex inter-relationship of narrative timelines culminates in the massacre itself and then flashes forward to the meeting between Eva and Kevin one year after the killings. The effects of this complex structuring of time in the plot can be usefully explored by considering the opportunities it affords the storyteller for showing parallels between characters and events, and in raising questions about cause and effect.


> How exposition of the narrative occurs in the film can be an interesting source of inquiry. We are presented with fractured elements of a story at the beginning that we have to piece together with little indication of how to organise these into a chronological framework of time and space. The difficulty of doing this is compounded by the fact that there is a lack of expositional dialogue and conventional establish of narrative setting. The first three scenes are the net curtains blowing in the wind, the tomato festival and Eva waking up which all occur in very different places and times (which we discover later) but how we can organise these scenes into a story is restricted from us until much later in the film.


> Eva’s and Kevin’s characters provide many sources for inquiry, particularly in their position within the narrative. The questions about who is the film’s protagonist and antagonist, who is the ‘centre’ or initiator of the drama and how we are supposed to respond to the characters is complex and ambiguous at times. This complexity of character identification and function within the narrative is further complicated by the use of mirroring. The characters are made to look like each other and often display very similar expressions and body language… frequent graphic matches force a further comparison which suggests characters that are connected in more ways than simply a mother-son relationship.