Now this is a horror movie (in perhaps the truest sense of the term).

Lynn Ramsey’s We Need To Talk About Kevin isn’t necessarily a scary film, though don’t let the seemingly placid facade fool you, because here lie monsters.  Though, unlike in most horror movies, these creatures don’t wear hockey masks or look like an experiment in acupuncture gone awry.

Instead they look like you and me, and by the time they reveal their true nature, it’s too late.

Tilda Swinton is Eva Khatchadourian, and you can tell by the way people react to her that she’s was somehow involved with something really terrible.

(The movie doesn’t for most of its running time let on why it is that she’s so reviled by most people in her community, though it becomes abundantly clear soon enough).

The movie flashes forward and backward in time, and it’s apparent that Eva was in a much better place in the past and the movie navigates an uncharted middle ground.

In that perhaps idealized place we meet her husband Franklin (John C. Reilly), her son Kevin (Rock Duer, as a toddler; Jasper Newell, from 6-8 years old and Ezra Miller, as a teenager) and daughter Celia (Ashley Gerasimovich).

From the outside looking in Eva’s family probably seemed an ideal one, though under closer scrutiny you could see faults undermining their supposedly happy lives.

Though there’s something about Kevin that’s a bit off, and the challenge is to see if you can spot where he goes off the rails.

And that moment never quite arrives, though the movie doesn’t spend too much time speculating as to why Kevin does what he does, but when he cries for attention, he makes sure that everyone pays attention.

And We Need To Talk About Kevin will do the same to you.

We Need To Talk About Kevin is currently on Netflix,