We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011 film) = Finished

We Need To Talk About Kevin doesn't give a single, flying F*CK about your bewilderment.

A lot of discussion about storytelling goes into the onboarding process. How to do an accelerated opening, how to ease people into a more complicated or involved tale...We Need To Talk About Kevin seems to defy a lot of that advice. 

It's opening is a broken kaleidoscope of impressions, scenes, and timelines. Long sequences of life without seeming root or context, followed by quickshots of activity you wish would just linger somewhere, anywhere. There may be a good 30-45 minutes in this 2-hour movie where you have no idea what's going on...and it works.

It somehow works.

The best way to explain the pacing of We Need To Talk About An Ancronym Because This is Getting Kind Of Ridiculous is in a single word: congealing.

You're thrown into a river of information without a mooring line--a basis to establish your narrative perspective going forward.
This is important.
Not being given a single bit of solid ground to stand on--or just rare flashes of it--means you can't form an incorrect impression. Your perspective is constantly shifting, so as the movie continues to unveil itself, your opinion and viewpoint is free to shift alongside it. This actually reduces confusion, because once We Need To Talk About Kevin finally begins to stick to a couple solid throughlines, the kaleidoscope transforms into images of clarity. You can now draw direct emotional and narrative connections between all the microthreads you were initially given, and trace their impact on a central story that has become more deep, nuanced, and full than it would have been given any other structure.

In the end, Eva's understanding of her collective life experiences coalesces at the same times that yours does. She embraces Kevin, and in loving her son through both his madness and intentional attacks against her very essence, Eva wins.
It takes patience to get to this point, but if you reach it...you win too.