The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) – Y. Lanthimos

Yorgos Lanthimos’s movies are exceedingly strange, partly because they tend to feature highly stylized sometimes affectless acting, partly because they are staged and shot in a chilly clinical way, but mostly because the plots hold things back, gradually offering up unusual events or “underlying principles” as though they were normal when clearly they are not.  His previous film was The Lobster (2015) which featured a world in which it is illegal to be single (and if you cannot find a spouse you are turned into an animal of your choosing).  That one starred Colin Farrell, as does The Killing of a Sacred Deer.  Here he plays a surgeon who has a friendly relationship with a teenage boy that he seems to be keeping from others. Later, we discover that the boy’s father died on the operating table, so the friendship seems to be Farrell’s way of expressing sympathy (or reducing guilt).  The boy (played by Barry Keoghan) seems friendly toward Farrell, if not a little needy (as is his now single mum).  That is, until he places a curse on Farrell’s family.  The rest of the film shows the family (including wife Nicole Kidman) coping with this predicament, which unlike the characters in previous Lanthimos films, they don’t accept as matter-of-fact but instead take a long time to come to grips with - and the movie sort of lopes along as they struggle.  Sure, there are lots of weird and inappropriate moments (particularly odd sexual disclosures) that make this more than your usual family-menaced-by-evil-outsider flick but it isn’t entirely out-of-this-world – instead everything is basically made as mundane as possible, so it’s our world but somehow off-kilter.  The alien soundtrack and unusual camera choices add to the effect.