We need to talk about Kevin

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Swinton conveys states of mind brilliantly, as do the faces of the playing Kevin as a pre-teen manipulative little monster and spiteful narcissistic 15-year-old planner of a massacre.

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Tilda Swinton was plucked from the ranks of little-known and gifted indie British actresses, by fellow-Scot Danny Boyle, and put on The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio in 2000. It took a few years for the oddly beautiful and charismatic talent to became a mainstream top-billed star in the UK and then the USA; her latest award-winning role (2011) also arrived courtesy of another Scot: director Lynne Ramsay.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is based on the Orange Prize-winning novel of the same name by Lionel Shriver (a London-resident American woman who adopted a male name, as many successful female writers have done). Probably influenced by the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, it examines the development of a psychopathic child. His character is reviewed through the recollections by his mother following his murder spree.

The screenplay by Ramsay and her partner Rory Kinnear took several years to get into production (by BBC Films and the UK Film Council, with extra funds from Steven Soderbergh and other movie angels. Ramsay's previous movie was Morvern Callar (2002), which followed her breakthrough debut feature Ratcatcher (1999). She remains a distinctive indie director, utilising hand-held cinematography, non-linear narrative and assertive editing effects to engage her audience's attention. Excessively so in her over-usage of symbolic red (as blood, in a festival of tomatoes, highlighted in jam, lights, lampshades, dresses and more) to reflect the mental states of the anguished mother and amoral child.

Swinton conveys states of mind brilliantly, much of the time without dialogue. Her eyes, facial lines, footsteps and glances mesmerise. So do the faces of the two young actors playing Kevin as a pre-teen manipulative little monster who refuses to communicate or get toilet-trained, and then as a spiteful narcissistic 15-year-old planner of a massacre. One day, near his 16th birthday, he takes his longbow to school and slaughters fellow students, having already shot down his father and young sister.

He'd previously blinded her in one eye, and the story stretches credulity with its failure to suggest that no person other than the mother was ever worried about the boy's personality (which supposedly only flowered when his mother reads him a story about Robin Hood's archery skills). Almost risibly too, the father (John C. Reilly playing yet another spineless non-character) always makes excuses for a child whose malicious cunning he doesn't see or sense.

Barely credible too is the decision of the mother (a published travel book author) to stay in the overly hostile and vengeful local community, and become a travel agency assistant, visiting her son's prison each week only to sit silently and avoid looking at him. At the movie's end, reached slowly via an increasingly tense sequence of flashbacks, the son - facing a "new school" in adult prison - shows nerves and expresses self-doubt for the first time.

The mother embraces him, coolly, and her audience will be no wiser whether she's proof that evil is bred in genes and/or nurtured by misguided parents. All that matters in the end is Swinton's spell-binding performance, well worth a 2012 Oscar nomination [which it didn't get].