Words trickle carefully out of characters’ mouths in filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Their vocal tones are flat and measured so as not to rock any boats or step on any toes. This is a polite society, and there must be no transgressions into any of those unsavory and useless things the unwashed plebs refer to as “emotions.”
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| Photo credit: The Killing of a Sacred Deer/IMDb |
It is, of course, a charade. These feeling-free automatons, led by an in-denial surgeon named Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell), trudge through life as though they have been outfitted with invisible weight vests. Each person in Steven’s life, from his wife, Anna (Nicole Kidman), to their two kids, Kim (Raffey Cassidy) and Bob (Sunny Suljic), has seen everything that makes them human wrung from them by the dysfunction of upper-middle-class living. Their social behavior is so genteel and empty that it’s painful to watch. (The taste of lemonade and acknowledging that flowers are nice are regular topics of conversation.)
Lanthimos, who co-wrote the script with Efthymis Filippou, has a thing for repression and how it can lead afflicted people to unload their insecurities and desires at wildly inappropriate times and in wildly inappropriate ways. At a gala event for doctors at his hospital Steven blurts, unprompted, to a colleague that his daughter has recently started menstruating—describing sexually taboo topics is a recurring thing for Steven throughout the film.
It’s in keeping with Lanthimos’s last collaboration with Farrell, 2016’s The Lobster, with the unnaturally handsome actor working hard to obscure his classic leading man appeal (he sports a beard here that is so bushy that Hemingway would tell him to take it down a notch) to tell a story about how our social systems trap us in cages where we are unable to express ourselves in healthy or constructive ways. Our curiosity, our worries and insecurities, Lanthimos says, are never able to be addressed because we bury them—and then, poof, here comes a disaster for which we are not remotely prepared to deal with.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer’s disaster comes in the person of Martin, a mentally deranged 16-year-old that Steven spends time with because years earlier Steven killed his father on the operating table. Martin, played by Barry Keoghan with the kind of vague menace you may recognize if you’ve ever had a gawky and greasy person glare at you on public transportation, is also apparently imbued with a sadistic form of magic. His master plan for hanging out with Steven extends beyond receiving expensive gifts borne of guilt. He finds a way to smite Steven’s kids with a mysterious illness that causes their legs to stop working, their appetites to evaporate so much that even force feeding doesn’t work, and their eyes to bleed. It’s alarming, but more alarming still is the deal Martin cuts with Steven: Choose which kid you love more and let the other one die, and the other one will get better. The debt will be paid.
Martin’s is a remarkably unsettling proposition, one that Steven, Anna, and the movie spend far too much time dismissing out of hand as the threat of a crazy person, which leaves open the possibility that Martin is causing some sort of mass hysteria among the Murphy family. Is it fake? Is Martin putting the kids up to it as a form of torture? Is he actually magic? These questions would normally matter to the plot, but they don’t matter to Lanthimos, who refuses pointedly to answer them.
Instead, unfortunately, he focuses on the thing that does matter to him, which is how our anesthetized culture prevents us from feeling the things that matter.
If his film could find a second gear, Lanthimos might be able to express the nuances of his observation about the emotionally numbing effects of our society. Instead, he relies too heavily on the fluorescent harshness of cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis’s imagery, which is heavy on smoke-stain yellow and pasty cream colors. The camera trails Steven, who is often framed alone in the center of the screen to heighten his loneliness, through empty hallways as he tries to get his children to walk again.
The pace never picks up from its early moments, which can only be described as molasses-esque, and the score’s blaring string-heavy arrangements are discordant and unsettling from the word go, so their impact is blunted by the time bad things start happening to the Murphy clan.
This has the effect of turning what should be thrilling into something drab and what should be deeply discomforting and disgusting into little more than an annoyance. Steven’s choices, thanks to the desensitized nature of Farrell’s performance, never feel equal to the actions being taken on the screen, and the actions themselves are presented in such flat and mundane ways that they lose their power.
At best, the climax plays with a hint of pitch-black comedy because of its understated camerawork, but that’s probably too generous a description of what is mostly an irksome few minutes devoid of passion, fear, or reluctance. Like the rest of the film, this is meant to be a comment on how we, as repressed people, approach what should be gut-wrenching decisions with deadened eyes and a pulse that doesn’t quicken.
But dead eyes and a steady pulse are not especially helpful when making a thriller.
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Writers: Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthymis Filippou
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Alicia Silverstone, Colin Farrell, Raffey Cassidy, Barry Keoghan, Sunny Suljic, Bill Camp
Rating: 2/5 stars
Available in theaters now
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