Trust me, when an outfit like Oscilloscope picks up a film that has shown at the Cannes Film Festival, it means that other players with a lot more money were scared that it might not do too well with U.S. filmgoers. It also means it didn’t cost an arm and a leg to acquire. Such is the situation with Lynn Ramsay‘s We Need To Talk About Kevin, which many of us saw earlier this month.

In Cannes I described Ramsay’s film as “emotionally speaking, rat poison.” I also observed that “as far as Ramsay’s film is concerned Kevin (Ezra Miller) is just a steely-brained, black-eyed Belezebub who’s been brought to life in order to pour acid into people’s lives. His ultimate acts of destruction happen at the very end, but they’re pretty much anti-climactic given the certainty in the audience’s mind that the only humane and compassionate response to this kid early on would have been to put him in a burlap bag, fill it with rocks and toss it off a pier.”