☆☆☆½
The Killing of a Sacred Deer confidently dares you to hate it, and frequently succeeds. It's not a movie I would necessarily recommend, but it's one I'm not going to be able to forget. If you thought Yorgos Lanthimos created a weird and unsettling film in The Lobster, you don't know the half of it until you've seen The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
In the hands of another director, The Killing of a Sacred Deer might have turned into the kind of low-budget supernatural horror-thriller that you might find released by Blumhouse Productions. Give it just a twist, and it would be a different film indeed. Lanthimos does give it a twist, a big one, in exactly the opposite direction, and turns it into a Kubrick-inspired nightmare of controlled madness. It's shot with such a careful, detached, artistic style that it must mean something -- but maybe not; maybe it's just its own perverse, unsettling thing.
Colin Farrell leads a tight ensemble as a quiet, vaguely depressed cardiology surgeon named Steven living in anonymous, antiseptic Midwest comfort with his opthalmologist wife Anna, played by Nicole Kidman, and handsome children Kim and Bob (Raffey Cassidy and Sunny Suljic, both uncommonly good). But Dad has something of a secret. Well, a lot of them, actually, with the most obvious being that he's become uncomfortably close with a teenage boy named Martin (Barry Keoghan). There's something going on here, but in its long, languid opening scenes it's not at all clear what it might be.
Martin insinuates himself into the doctor's family with the same sort of arch and stilted politeness that everyone in the film possesses. In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, everyone seems to be walking around in a mannered daze, like the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They talk with awkwardness, even the children. Even sex becomes a detached ritual that is as disturbing as it is fascinating.
Barry's father, it is eventually revealed, died while our good doctor was operating on him, and both Martin and his intensely unhinged mother (Alicia Silverstone in a crazed cameo) put the blame squarely on Steven.
Things are already weird, but get a whole lot weirder when Steven's son Bob wakes up one morning unable to walk. That's when Martin tells Steven that the horrors are just beginning. His whole family is going to suffer until Steven sets life in balance -- just as Steven killed Martin's father, Martin is going to require Steven to kill a member of his own family as just payment. If not, some really, really screwed up stuff is going to happen to them.
Sounds like the stuff of blood-soaked Greek tragedy? It's that and more, a theatrical, well-rehearsed drama that takes its time to unfold but becomes so off-the-wall bonkers that you're helpless to do anything other than keep watching. Lanthimos, his co-screenwriter Efthymis Filippou, and the exemplary cast are so damned committed to the concept here that it's downright impressive.
Kidman, in particular, impresses with the sort of fearlessness she brought to her small-screen role in "Big Little Lies," and Keoghan is an off-balance presence both physically and emotionally that it's impossible to have any idea of where The Killing of a Sacred Deer is going even though it is so sure of its own way. The final 15 minutes genuinely border on ridiculousness, but somehow the entire film avoids the hysterical theatrics that turned mother! into such a bore.
Calm and steady, The Killing of a Sacred Deer commits itself to the expression of its particular ideas with an almost awesome force. It's a movie that requires a tremendous amount of effort from the audience, with a climax that is staggeringly disturbing. (The film contains relatively little overt violence, but it still requires a force of effort to watch some of its key scenes.)
It wouldn't have taken too much for The Killing of a Sacred Deer to be a more run-of-the-mill sort of thriller, but then it wouldn't have been the film it is, for better and for worse.
Viewed November 17, 2017 -- Pacific Sherman Oaks 5
1650
In the hands of another director, The Killing of a Sacred Deer might have turned into the kind of low-budget supernatural horror-thriller that you might find released by Blumhouse Productions. Give it just a twist, and it would be a different film indeed. Lanthimos does give it a twist, a big one, in exactly the opposite direction, and turns it into a Kubrick-inspired nightmare of controlled madness. It's shot with such a careful, detached, artistic style that it must mean something -- but maybe not; maybe it's just its own perverse, unsettling thing.
Colin Farrell leads a tight ensemble as a quiet, vaguely depressed cardiology surgeon named Steven living in anonymous, antiseptic Midwest comfort with his opthalmologist wife Anna, played by Nicole Kidman, and handsome children Kim and Bob (Raffey Cassidy and Sunny Suljic, both uncommonly good). But Dad has something of a secret. Well, a lot of them, actually, with the most obvious being that he's become uncomfortably close with a teenage boy named Martin (Barry Keoghan). There's something going on here, but in its long, languid opening scenes it's not at all clear what it might be.
Martin insinuates himself into the doctor's family with the same sort of arch and stilted politeness that everyone in the film possesses. In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, everyone seems to be walking around in a mannered daze, like the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They talk with awkwardness, even the children. Even sex becomes a detached ritual that is as disturbing as it is fascinating.
Barry's father, it is eventually revealed, died while our good doctor was operating on him, and both Martin and his intensely unhinged mother (Alicia Silverstone in a crazed cameo) put the blame squarely on Steven.
Things are already weird, but get a whole lot weirder when Steven's son Bob wakes up one morning unable to walk. That's when Martin tells Steven that the horrors are just beginning. His whole family is going to suffer until Steven sets life in balance -- just as Steven killed Martin's father, Martin is going to require Steven to kill a member of his own family as just payment. If not, some really, really screwed up stuff is going to happen to them.
Sounds like the stuff of blood-soaked Greek tragedy? It's that and more, a theatrical, well-rehearsed drama that takes its time to unfold but becomes so off-the-wall bonkers that you're helpless to do anything other than keep watching. Lanthimos, his co-screenwriter Efthymis Filippou, and the exemplary cast are so damned committed to the concept here that it's downright impressive.
Kidman, in particular, impresses with the sort of fearlessness she brought to her small-screen role in "Big Little Lies," and Keoghan is an off-balance presence both physically and emotionally that it's impossible to have any idea of where The Killing of a Sacred Deer is going even though it is so sure of its own way. The final 15 minutes genuinely border on ridiculousness, but somehow the entire film avoids the hysterical theatrics that turned mother! into such a bore.
Calm and steady, The Killing of a Sacred Deer commits itself to the expression of its particular ideas with an almost awesome force. It's a movie that requires a tremendous amount of effort from the audience, with a climax that is staggeringly disturbing. (The film contains relatively little overt violence, but it still requires a force of effort to watch some of its key scenes.)
It wouldn't have taken too much for The Killing of a Sacred Deer to be a more run-of-the-mill sort of thriller, but then it wouldn't have been the film it is, for better and for worse.
Viewed November 17, 2017 -- Pacific Sherman Oaks 5
1650
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