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| A still image cleverly drawn longer makes up the evocative poster for Yorgos Lanthimos' The Killing of a Sacred Deer |
A well-off cardiac surgeon has kept his strange friendship with a teenage boy named Martin a secret from his optometrist wife and their children. When he decides to invite the boy over to meet them, it drastically alters their lives.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer is the 6th feature from Greek master filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth/Kynodontas (2009)), once again co-written by Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou (Alps/Alpeis (2011)). The film is based loosely on the Greek myth Iphigenia in Aulis (405 BC) by Euripedes (Medea (431 BC)), which concerned Greek leader Agememnon's sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia to appease the goddess Artemis.
Although The Killing of a Sacred Deer also features Colin Farrell (Ondine (2009)) as the protagonist, the film is quite different from Lanthimos' previous film, his absurdly funny wrestling with the concept of love, The Lobster (2015), which it can't compete with. The film rolls out as a highly cinematic (cinematography by another Lanthimos regular, Thimios Bakatakis (Blind (2014))) psycho-thriller that invokes Hitchcockian comparisons (masterpiece Rear Window (1954) and great horror Psycho (1960) for instance), its climax calls Michael Haneke's equally grisly Funny Games (1997) to mind, while dealing with a hair-raising young sociopath that bears comparison to the one we meet in Lynne Ramsay's masterpiece We Need to Talk About Kevin (2010). The dead eyes, snakily superficial courtesy and jumpiness of Barry Keoghan's ('71 (2014)) performance as Martin is truly a feat, possibly the year's best portrayal of a villain/psychopath and a prime example of the type of kid you'll wish you and/or your own kids never befriend. The script and Lanthimos' direction plays up a feeling of some unexplained perversion in his relation to Farrell. As the basis for this tension and their relation as such is revealed, some of the suspense of the film seeps out, as the plot attains an inevitability, a karmic dimension or, more accurate here, the promise of a Greek tragedy, which we all know how will end, as tragedies all end the same way: Bad.
As the scenes play out with their realistic thread blurred out, the film's unpleasant developments, mostly deprived of their previous suspense, get to feel as though simply made up by a sadistic filmmaker. As another recent, unpleasant, artsy offering, Darren Aronofsky's mother! (2017), The Killing of a Sacred Deer is an ambiguous mystery thriller open for interpretation. You may take Martin to be the Devil in disguise; you may take the film as a critical scolding of fanatically scientifically minded modern people, who have to face an unexplainable tragedy here that's as futile, it could be said, as the title's referral to a sacred deer getting slaughtered, (an otherwise non-existing concept in the film). - A psycho-analytical mind would have a feast with how the sins of a parent literally cripple his children here.
The humor of Lanthimos' previous, brilliant The Lobster is naturally toned down here, although humor found in the absurd and pitch-black material is still to be found.
Nicole Kidman (Moulin Rouge! (2001)) adds a welcome depth and dimension to almost any film, and her strong performance here is no exception. The Killing of a Sacred Deer also has a compelling, often hard-to-watch performance from young Sunny Suljic (The Unspoken (2015)).
It is ultimately hard to pinpoint what The Killing of a Sacred Deer is telling us. But that may well be a part of its mission: laying an unexplainable tragedy before us to bother us may be its very calling.
Related post:
Yorgos Lanthimos: Dogtooth/Κυνόδοντας (Kynodontas) (2009) - Lanthimos establishes himself internationally with an unsettling family portrait
Watch a trailer for the film here
Cost: Unknown
Box office: 4.2 mil. $ and counting
= Uncertain
[The Killing of a Sacred Deer premiered 22 May (Cannes) and runs 121 minutes. Filming took place from August 2016 - ? in Ohio, including Cincinnati. The film won the screenplay award in Cannes, tied with Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here. It opened #31 to a good 115k $ first weekend in 4 theaters in North America, where it has peaked at #22 and in 238 theaters and grossed 2.1 mil. $ to date. The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets so far have been the UK with 0.9 mil. $ and Australia with 0.3 mil. $. The film is nominated for 2 Independent Spirit awards. It opens in UAE, Taiwan, Germany and Hungary in December 2017. Lanthimos will return behind a TV movie comedy with Kirsten Dunst entitled On Becoming a God in Central Florida and a historic biopic with Emma Stone and other stars, The Favorite (2018), both without his screenwriting partner up to now. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is certified fresh at 79 % with a 7.7/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
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