Directed by Lynne Ramsay. Starring Tilda Swinton, John C Reilly, Ezra Miller, Jasper Newell, Rocky Duer, Ashley Gerasimovich 16 cert, limited release, 111 min

In the hands of fearless director Lynne Ramsay, a controversial novel has become an upsetting, dramatically heightened cinematic experience, writes DONALD CLARKE

PASS THE smelling salts, Nora. Whatever else you might say about this barn-storming adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s controversial novel concerning (perhaps) post-natal pedophobia, you can’t argue that it’s anything other than cinematic.

Rather than working her way dutifully through the text, Scottish director Lynne Ramsay has employed every facet of the art — startling cinematography, unsettling sound design, Grand Guignol acting — to deliver a slab of film as dramatically heightened as anything by Michael Powell. It is not all empty show, however. An icy logic seems to drive the extravagant gestures. There’s much to ponder here.

It is giving little away to say that We Need to Talk About Kevinrelates the aftermath of and lead- up to a mass high school slaying. More mournfully elongated than ever, Tilda Swinton plays Eva Khatchadourian, a travel writer, who moves from a hip New York garret to the suburbs when she becomes pregnant.

From the beginning, Eva’s son Kevin comes across as an unspeakably malign presence. He screams continually. He seems to wilfully resist toilet training. He splatters the walls with baby food.

Later, these forgivable manifestations of immaturity give way to a near-psychotic malevolence. When Eva lovingly redecorates her study with maps, he destroys her work with accidentally abstract- expressionist sprays of paint. There are suggestions that he has hatched considerably more dangerous outrages.

While Eva becomes increasingly fraught and furious, her quiet, near-invisible husband (an underused John C Reilly) pleads for understanding. He still thinks kids will be kids. Maybe the boy was just trying to help with his mum’s study.

These sequences are jarringly intercut with scenes from Eva’s grim experiences following the atrocity. Her house is daubed with red paint. She edges nervously about the supermarket. In one piece of bravura editing, we cut from her walking past young ballerinas in the school to her later sorry tramp down the corridors of the prison where Kevin is confined.

The film has already stirred some controversy for its depiction of Kevin as an unrelenting devil child. Played as a teenager by the chiselled, poisonously beautiful Ezra Miller – cheekbones like stilettos – the pocket hoodlum could step comfortably into a possessed-child horror film.

Does the film lose the book’s moral ambiguity by creating such an unrelenting monster? Readers were greatly unnerved by Eva’s early antagonism towards her son. Most viewers of the film would welcome this Kevin being pushed down the nearest marble stairwell.

Such objections surely fail to consider the surreally intensified flavour of We Need to Talk About Kevin. In previous films such as Ratcatcherand Morvern Callar, Ramsay has dallied with sombre dreamworlds, but Kevinfeatures a complete immersion in the hyper- real.

Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey finds pop-art colours in every forbidding set-up. (Is it a coincidence that soup cans feature prominently?) The sound design features not just grating inhuman rumbles – and characteristically abstract chords from Jonny Greenwood – but distorted versions of tunes by such unlikely personalities as skiffle-king Lonnie Donegan. The very presence of Tilda Swinton, an actor born on a stranger planet, heightens the sense of brooding unreality.

The otherworldliness invites the interpretation that we are viewing the world through the distraught eyes of a troubled woman. Did Kevin really behave as badly in his early years? Is Eva retrospectively reimagining the facts? The sense of a subjective perspective adds extra layers to an already gripping and troubling film.

It's not perfect. Some of Ramsay's aesthetic decisions (a gratuitous taste for red, in particular) tend towards the unsubtle. The mechanics of the final catastrophe, lifted from the book, seem somewhat implausible. But We Need to Talk About Kevinoffers stirring proof that voguish novels do not always generate disappointing films. Sometime they produce near-masterpieces.