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The Killing of a Sacred Deer, 2017
There's a right way to do mannered, weird, and ambiguous and a wrong way to do mannered, weird, and ambiguous. Lanthimos consistently manages to land on the right side of that line, even if this one didn't speak to me as strongly as his other film I've seen, Dogtooth.
Heart surgeon Steven (Colin Farrell) seems to have a pretty great life. He has a good career, an accomplished wife (Nicole Kidman) and two nice-enough kids. From the very beginning of the film we see that Steven has a strange relationship with a teenage boy named Martin (Barry Keoghan). Martin has an off-kilter element to him that puts their scenes on an edge, and Steven's undercurrent of discomfort raises the question of the nature of their relationship. When we finally do learn what is at play, it has serious consequences for Steven and his family.
To start at the ending, I was kind of underwhelmed with the very last act of the film. Maybe even just the very last 10 minutes. Somehow it didn't really cohere for me in a thematic sense, and even from a stylistic sense it was only sort of satisfying. But it's hard to mind all that much because the journey to the finish line was pretty fantastic.
Everything in this film is wrong. Just a few degrees off of what it should be. The camera retreats from two characters about 10 feet further back than one senses it should be as it tracks them down a hallway. The dialogue sounds like something an artificial intelligence machine would create in an attempt to mimic human dialogue ("Your son tells me that you have a lot of hair under your arms."). And it is much to the credit of the actors (especially Farrell) that they seem to have this bizarro cadence well under control.
At some level, this is a movie that defies any need for theme or story arc, simply because of how strongly it grasps its tone of dark humor. It's one thing to watch a man drop a sick child repeatedly to test whether or not he is faking. But around the time
I was laughing out loud. Many reviews and sites like IMDb refer to this film as a thriller or a horror. But, I'm sorry, is this not just amazing dark comedy?
That said, the film does have a certain ambiance of dread. And it certainly knows when to throw in a shockingly graphic moment to give the characters and the audience a jolt. But it was hard for me to feel "scared" by a film that had so many comedic moments.
Aside from being a bit underwhelmed by the ending, my only other complaint was that the weirdness of the film (and the distinctly not-quite right dialogue) made it hard to regard the characters as real people as opposed to figures playing their roles. Dogtooth also had a strange internal logic, but in that film the strangeness is a result of something that has been imposed on the characters. In Killing of a Sacred Deer, the whole world seems tuned into this very weird frequency. The unreality of it heightens the humor and the discomfort, but it also sabotages suspension of disbelief because it is so intentionally unbelievable.
Still, totally worth seeing. I am very behind on Lanthimos's filmography, but as far as I'm concerned he's two-for-two with what I've seen.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer, 2017
There's a right way to do mannered, weird, and ambiguous and a wrong way to do mannered, weird, and ambiguous. Lanthimos consistently manages to land on the right side of that line, even if this one didn't speak to me as strongly as his other film I've seen, Dogtooth.
Heart surgeon Steven (Colin Farrell) seems to have a pretty great life. He has a good career, an accomplished wife (Nicole Kidman) and two nice-enough kids. From the very beginning of the film we see that Steven has a strange relationship with a teenage boy named Martin (Barry Keoghan). Martin has an off-kilter element to him that puts their scenes on an edge, and Steven's undercurrent of discomfort raises the question of the nature of their relationship. When we finally do learn what is at play, it has serious consequences for Steven and his family.
To start at the ending, I was kind of underwhelmed with the very last act of the film. Maybe even just the very last 10 minutes. Somehow it didn't really cohere for me in a thematic sense, and even from a stylistic sense it was only sort of satisfying. But it's hard to mind all that much because the journey to the finish line was pretty fantastic.
Everything in this film is wrong. Just a few degrees off of what it should be. The camera retreats from two characters about 10 feet further back than one senses it should be as it tracks them down a hallway. The dialogue sounds like something an artificial intelligence machine would create in an attempt to mimic human dialogue ("Your son tells me that you have a lot of hair under your arms."). And it is much to the credit of the actors (especially Farrell) that they seem to have this bizarro cadence well under control.
At some level, this is a movie that defies any need for theme or story arc, simply because of how strongly it grasps its tone of dark humor. It's one thing to watch a man drop a sick child repeatedly to test whether or not he is faking. But around the time
WARNING: spoilers below
Steven's paralyzed son was dragging himself across the kitchen floor and cheerily exclaiming "I'll go water the plants now!"
That said, the film does have a certain ambiance of dread. And it certainly knows when to throw in a shockingly graphic moment to give the characters and the audience a jolt. But it was hard for me to feel "scared" by a film that had so many comedic moments.
Aside from being a bit underwhelmed by the ending, my only other complaint was that the weirdness of the film (and the distinctly not-quite right dialogue) made it hard to regard the characters as real people as opposed to figures playing their roles. Dogtooth also had a strange internal logic, but in that film the strangeness is a result of something that has been imposed on the characters. In Killing of a Sacred Deer, the whole world seems tuned into this very weird frequency. The unreality of it heightens the humor and the discomfort, but it also sabotages suspension of disbelief because it is so intentionally unbelievable.
Still, totally worth seeing. I am very behind on Lanthimos's filmography, but as far as I'm concerned he's two-for-two with what I've seen.