I was in a noticeably uncomfortable position in the earliest hours of Sunday morning in Portsmouth, NH. Waiting by a harshly lit streetlamp for a solid two hours after "We Need to Talk About Kevin" is a position I'd not wish amongst many, if any at all. To say that Lynne Ramsay has made her return with a vengeance would be a gross understatement. In that mystified delirium where the experiences I had been made witness to were drunkenly shooting straight through my mind, the only response I could relate to twitter was this: "I was not prepared for what was beyond the curtain."
That statement was perhaps not the most informative to send out to the uninformed masses of twitter, but I doubt I could have formed anything more coherent for my mindset in that moment. The first image we see of the film is this ethereal white curtain wavering aside an open window. It's a relatively tame image at the time, and the immediate decoder in me is dumbly thinking, "Oh, they're pulling back the curtain to show us what it's veiling." As simple as that sounds, it is in a way true. It's significance is not wholly known at the start, but once you're past it, there's absolutely no going back. You're there to the grim end. It's the only warning the audience is going to get.
