Review: The Killing of a Sacred Deer

In his first English-language film, The Lobster (2015), Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos introduced us to a weird sanitorium world where unmarried people fought desperately against the clock to find a mate. The punishment if they failed: being surgically reincarnated as an animal. A similar bizarre and macabre sensibility inhabits Lanthimos’ second English-language film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, though here it’s a simpler – and it must be said, less interesting – story with obvious roots in the Greek tragedy of Agamemnon, with the impossible lose-lose choices the hero must face after making a fatal mistake.

Steven (Colin Farrell, bearded and paunchy) is a middle-aged heart surgeon who regularly meets up with a troubled and fatherless teenage boy, Martin (Barry Keoghan). They drink coffee and exchange stilted pleasantries and gifts, and eventually the boy is invited home to meet Steven’s wife, Anna (Nicole Kidman) and two children, Kim (Raffey Cassidy) and Bob (Sunny Suljic). To explain more would spoil the story’s unspooling, but it’s sufficient to say that as his children fall ill with a mysterious ailment causing paralysis and finally bleeding from the eyes, Steven is forced to choose which of his family members must be sacrificed.

Lanthimos has his actors speak in affectless monotone, delivering dialogue that’s both absurd and banal. Steven tells colleagues at a dinner that his daughter has begun menstruating, and nobody bats an eyelid. Anna announces at the dinner table that ‘Bob has nice hair. We all have nice hair.’ There’s an eerie comedy in this. Everybody comments on Kim’s beautiful voice, though when she sings (Ellie Goulding’s triumphant ‘Burn’), her voice is weak and ordinary. This blank automaton-like performance style serves to underline this story is a metaphor, and its characters are puppets in service to Lanthimos’ somewhat sadistic entertainment.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer succeeds in taking us to a place that’s grotesque and puzzling, though thanks to interesting and starkly beautiful shot compositions by DOP Thimios Bakatakis and editing by Yorgos Mavropsaridis (both of whom also worked on The Lobster and Dogtooth), it’s not boring or ugly, merely sterile. Whether you really want to spend time in this space where children, paralysed from the waist down, drag themselves around the house and plead for their lives, while their parents weigh up the options and values of each child, is worth pondering before you submit to this increasingly disturbing psychological horror.

Aristotle wrote that the function of the stories of tragic heroes was to produce fear, compassion and then to enjoy the purification of catharsis. The problem with The Killing of a Sacred Deer is that nobody is heroic, compassion is absent and there’s no real catharsis – and ultimately no point.

- Rochelle Siemienowicz

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