A Surgeon's guilt leads him to mentor the teen son of a deceased patient. After weeks of diner lunches and awkward afternoon walks along the riverside, Steven (Farrell), our duplicitous leading man finds that Martin (Keoghan) has some seriously sinister plans in-store for him and his young family; a plan that ultimately puts Steven in an impossible excruciating moral dilemma.
This is essentially the plot The Killing of a Sacred Deer, the latest mad experiment concocted by the same warped mind that gave you the similarly themed Dogtooth (2009) and the deadpan black comedy The Lobster (2015). But lest you've seen either of those films, nothing can really prepare you for what this twisted little romp is really about and how this film goes about achieving its own ambitions. Director Yorgos Lanthimos isn't just an idiosyncratic art-house director with a wild hair for film-school suspense. No this guy is a cinematic mad scientist who takes all things familiar and makes them wholly unfamiliar by breaking everything down to the bare essentials.
What do I mean by this? Well for one the story doesn't ever feel the need to explain itself. In an interview famed director Alfred Hitchcock was once asked why the characters in his films never call the police. His answer was, "Because it's boring." Lanthimos seems to be taking that same approach not only for the crime elements of the story but the very mechanisms that make the story possible. It is never explained (nor does it need to be) how Martin goes about doing what he does. The only logic that counts exists within Martin's fractured state of mind; and we just have to live with whatever twisted logic happens to be exposed by the frame at the time.
While the story is very much in the vein of Hitchcock, the cinematography just screams Kubrickian other-worldliness. Everything is shot with a streamline economy so that every scene, every character, every plot point is tailor made for maximum ambiguity while never straining the limits of a traditional narrative. Yet despite its perfection in relaying information and theme, every frame and gently sweeping pan serves to overwhelm the viewer with a near constant feeling of unease. How much unease? Well the film literally starts with an un-obscured view of open-heart surgery. Whatever feeling you're liable to have while watching something like that (shock, disgust, anxiety, etc.) is going to be your default for two hours so buckle up.
In comparison to other outstanding horror films released this year, Sacred Deer certainly holds its own - even if the spirit of its horror is less Get Out (2017), or Jigsaw (2017) and more Werner Herzog oppressively reading Grimm Fairy tales. Yet in comparison to Lanthimo's other works, Sacred Deer feels like it doesn't have that same immutable fearlessness. That may have less to do with the film itself and more to do with the genre. The Lobster may have dabbled in some horror tropes but it was first and foremost a black satire on romantic love. Our expectations were naturally pretty limited in regards to "how far" they're willing to go with the premise. Thus when it really did "go that far" the wickedness of the satire felt all that more dangerous. Any satire of familial love on the part of Sacred Deer is played less with a sense of wickedness and more with a sense of dread. It still feels dangerous, but only to the extent the extent of bodily harm.
Thankfully the cast are perfectly suited for finding the flawed, ugly and human parts to their off-putting characters. Farrell is at his subdued, disquieted best as a complacent everyman suddenly put into a lose-lose scenario. Nicole Kidman, Sunny Suljic and especially the brooding Raffey Cassidy have between them all the cunning instincts needed to make their characters sympathetic while harboring the animosities needed to make the situation believable.
The real standout however is Barry Keoghan who takes what would have otherwise been a one-note Machiavelli and elevates him to the level of an uncaring God. His malevolence is scary not only because of his forceful actions and their inherent power imbalance but because there's nonchalance in everything he does. There's a void where his empathy and moral compass should be. So to compensate, he adapts a sense of justice where extreme measures are regular and they're seemingly the most human thing about him.
Keoghan's abrasive performance alone is definitely worth the admission price for horror fans, film fans and those already familiar with Lanthimos's unique approach to storytelling. Combined with the film's fable-like clarity of thought and this thing suddenly becomes a worthy piece of art crying to be studied and argued about for years. But for casual audiences, Sacred Deer may prove too outwardly bizarre and too much of a dialectic gut-punch to walk away satisfied. Which is a shame because I think Lanthimos is actually aiming for the unwitting who settled for whatever just started at the cinemas because Ragnarok sold out.
This is essentially the plot The Killing of a Sacred Deer, the latest mad experiment concocted by the same warped mind that gave you the similarly themed Dogtooth (2009) and the deadpan black comedy The Lobster (2015). But lest you've seen either of those films, nothing can really prepare you for what this twisted little romp is really about and how this film goes about achieving its own ambitions. Director Yorgos Lanthimos isn't just an idiosyncratic art-house director with a wild hair for film-school suspense. No this guy is a cinematic mad scientist who takes all things familiar and makes them wholly unfamiliar by breaking everything down to the bare essentials.
What do I mean by this? Well for one the story doesn't ever feel the need to explain itself. In an interview famed director Alfred Hitchcock was once asked why the characters in his films never call the police. His answer was, "Because it's boring." Lanthimos seems to be taking that same approach not only for the crime elements of the story but the very mechanisms that make the story possible. It is never explained (nor does it need to be) how Martin goes about doing what he does. The only logic that counts exists within Martin's fractured state of mind; and we just have to live with whatever twisted logic happens to be exposed by the frame at the time.
While the story is very much in the vein of Hitchcock, the cinematography just screams Kubrickian other-worldliness. Everything is shot with a streamline economy so that every scene, every character, every plot point is tailor made for maximum ambiguity while never straining the limits of a traditional narrative. Yet despite its perfection in relaying information and theme, every frame and gently sweeping pan serves to overwhelm the viewer with a near constant feeling of unease. How much unease? Well the film literally starts with an un-obscured view of open-heart surgery. Whatever feeling you're liable to have while watching something like that (shock, disgust, anxiety, etc.) is going to be your default for two hours so buckle up.
In comparison to other outstanding horror films released this year, Sacred Deer certainly holds its own - even if the spirit of its horror is less Get Out (2017), or Jigsaw (2017) and more Werner Herzog oppressively reading Grimm Fairy tales. Yet in comparison to Lanthimo's other works, Sacred Deer feels like it doesn't have that same immutable fearlessness. That may have less to do with the film itself and more to do with the genre. The Lobster may have dabbled in some horror tropes but it was first and foremost a black satire on romantic love. Our expectations were naturally pretty limited in regards to "how far" they're willing to go with the premise. Thus when it really did "go that far" the wickedness of the satire felt all that more dangerous. Any satire of familial love on the part of Sacred Deer is played less with a sense of wickedness and more with a sense of dread. It still feels dangerous, but only to the extent the extent of bodily harm.
Thankfully the cast are perfectly suited for finding the flawed, ugly and human parts to their off-putting characters. Farrell is at his subdued, disquieted best as a complacent everyman suddenly put into a lose-lose scenario. Nicole Kidman, Sunny Suljic and especially the brooding Raffey Cassidy have between them all the cunning instincts needed to make their characters sympathetic while harboring the animosities needed to make the situation believable.
The real standout however is Barry Keoghan who takes what would have otherwise been a one-note Machiavelli and elevates him to the level of an uncaring God. His malevolence is scary not only because of his forceful actions and their inherent power imbalance but because there's nonchalance in everything he does. There's a void where his empathy and moral compass should be. So to compensate, he adapts a sense of justice where extreme measures are regular and they're seemingly the most human thing about him.
Keoghan's abrasive performance alone is definitely worth the admission price for horror fans, film fans and those already familiar with Lanthimos's unique approach to storytelling. Combined with the film's fable-like clarity of thought and this thing suddenly becomes a worthy piece of art crying to be studied and argued about for years. But for casual audiences, Sacred Deer may prove too outwardly bizarre and too much of a dialectic gut-punch to walk away satisfied. Which is a shame because I think Lanthimos is actually aiming for the unwitting who settled for whatever just started at the cinemas because Ragnarok sold out.