No one plays flayed and haunted as well as Tilda Swinton does in the new film adaptation of Lionel Shriver's novel

We Need to Talk About Kevin
On release from 21st October

The Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay made an electrifying debut with 1999’s Ratcatcher, followed it up with the soulful Morvern Callar in 2001 and was then bounced into an enforced layoff (the result, in part, of a doomed attempt to adapt The Lovely Bones). Happily she shows no signs of rust on We Need to Talk About Kevin, neatly filleted from the bestselling novel by Lionel Shriver. Tilda Swinton is ideally cast as Eva, a one-time travel writer marooned in Connecticut, toiling to connect with her bad seed of a son (Ezra Miller, positively sulphurous). We know near the start that Kevin will commit a Columbine-style massacre at his high school but the deed itself is