It's been nine years since Scottish director Lynne Ramsay's last film, Morvern Callar.

Whatever the reasons – failed projects and the notoriously slow process of film development – it’s too long for someone with her gifts. So it’s pleasing to report that We Need To Talk About Kevin is worth the wait.

Ramsay’s adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel, which follows the thoughts of a woman whose son has perpetrated a high school massacre, is as disturbing and thought-provoking as its source. This may be the chilliest film you’ll see this year; at the same time, the questions it raises about nature versus nurture in the formation of evil are worth the discomfort.

The novel doesn’t focus on the crime, but the attempt by the boy’s mother, Eva, to come to terms with what he’s done and repair her own life. With fellow scriptwriter Rory Kinnear, Ramsay replaces Shriver’s narrative device of Eva’s letters with a full-frontal portrait of a woman haunted by memories and dreams.

The approach is established in the first sequence, as Eva (Tilda Swinton) is carried aloft by a mass of naked, seemingly blood-splattered people – in what might be seen as a great rave, or some kind of damnation; she then awakes, to the discovery that the locals have daubed her entire house in red paint.

While her community vilifies her, Eva reflects on the difficult family life that led to this moment. From her perspective, Kevin was always malign; a toddler, child, then teen who hated his mother. Yet we also see Eva’s sometimes shocking ambivalence to pregnancy, then the baby itself.

Her husband Franklin (John C Reilly) doesn’t help by denying his wife’s suggestions that their teenage son (Ezra Miller) is violent and manipulative. The couple need to talk about Kevin, but they never do. So did they, between them, create a monster? Or was the dark-eyed boy just born to be bad?

Like Shriver, Ramsay respects the value of the question, leaving it unanswered. Her actors play the ambiguities brilliantly, not least Swinton; we know what the actress can do, but here she juggles more emotions than most actors could handle in a whole career.

With Seamus McGarvey behind the camera, Ramsay orchestrates the movement between grim reality and Eva’s inner life with a poetic eye for detail and finely-honed sensibility.

Surprisingly, for someone with such an art-house pedigree, Steven Soderbergh can be one of the most direct and efficient storytellers in Hollywood. Contagion is a case in point, a disaster movie that is all the more terrifying because it’s so matter-of-fact.

The film charts the outbreak of a deadly virus, from the moment businesswoman Gywneth Paltrow is infected in Hong Kong and carries it back to the US, to its speedy transformation into a global disease and the race to find a cure.

You might call this a pandemic procedural, as Soderbergh globe trots between victims and their families, scientists, journalists and military, depicting the nuts and bolts of dealing with such a crisis. Without any discernible histrionics, it is utterly gripping.

In the kind of all-star cast that would grace the Seventies’ golden age of disaster movies, Matt Damon plays a man immune to the virus, Jude Law is an online journalist investigating the contagion, and Kate Winslet and Marion Cotillard are no-nonsense medics, risking their lives in the field.