We Need to Talk About Kevin + Chronicle

Is it the children we fear or the future?

As we move deeper into the Information Age, the West seems increasingly concerned that something is awry with the young people. We assign them illnesses to try to explain them and medicine to attempt to placate them. Are they more hyperactive because of the constant flow of stimuli they receive? Dubious. Do they suffer from a higher rate of autism because of vaccines? Nonsense. But we continue to root around for an answer to a question we can’t quite articulate, hoping that the right words or white pills will make it all go away. There’s something about Mary, and her brother is equally worrisome. As the tension mounts, film and TV arm children with old-school crossbows and new-age smartphones, positioning them as capable of the type of atrocities that heretofore has always been committed by those more gray than green.

Two such insightful recent films about these unspeakable creatures are Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and Josh Trank’s Chronicle. In the former, a mother tries to manage a child who is nihilism incarnate. A cold and brilliant thing who seems to have fallen to Earth, Kevin physically appears to be beyond race and gender, lacking the familiar characteristics that might bring his parents comfort. He’s a new world man–or whatever. The terror he imposes on his quiet family with a string of sadistic acts is just a warm-up for the wrath he’ll unleash on the larger world. In Trank’s thoughtful fantasy, a trio of high schoolers develop telekinetic powers after exposure to some sort of military-experiment radiation. Soon the lost boys can move cars with their minds and fly at will. But parlor tricks soon become blood sport, as the most disaffected of the bunch begins to wreak havoc.

Youth always delivers the new wave, but there’s a foreboding sense that they’ll do something horrible with today’s unparalleled information and tools, as if we’ve given birth to a generation of Frankensteins who’ll turn the electricity on us. But perhaps what’s so disconcerting isn’t that they’re announcing what’s to come but that it’s a future so radically different from what we’ve known. One of the angst-ridden teens in Chronicle says, when he realizes their powers might lead to mayhem: “We’re getting stronger…we need rules.” As we likewise grow stronger, thanks to science and technology and medicine, we also need rules. Rule number one: Don’t shoot the messenger.•