The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Dr. Steven Murphy is a renowned cardiovascular surgeon who presides over a spotless household with his wife and two children. Lurking at the margins of his idyllic suburban existence is Martin, a fatherless teen who insinuates himself into the doctor's life in gradually unsettling ways.
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Lanthimos’ bone-dry humour mixes with his giddy, wandering Steadicam – you’d think he’d just discovered the device, or seen The Shining once too often – to distort a familiar world of hospital wards, living spaces and city streets, where the family’s upper-middle-class mansion is surveyed through wide-angle lenses that render the rooms palatial tombs.
Imagine a remake of Cape Fear shot like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, with Max Cady recast as a child, and you’ll have some idea of the strangeness of Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
It’s Kubrickian to a fault, and the style, alongside the child characters and the bloodiness that eventually ensues, cannot but recall Kubrick’s own psychological horror masterpiece, The Shining (1980).
The direction is reminiscent of Kubrick’s The Shining, swapping the hotel for the hospital and slowly creeping, prowling at low levels, stalking these characters and ready to pounce on them like predators on their prey.
Imagine Sophie’s Choice about to meet The Shining, approaching from either side of Cape Fear.
But much like Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Barry Lyndon or The Shining, the longer I watched the more I wanted to know more.
It’s impossible to watch Kidman, meanwhile, without recalling her remote spouse of Eyes Wide Shut – unsurprising, given the extent to which Kubrick figures in Lanthimos’ aesthetic playbook here, acute bursts of György Ligeti’s discordant music and all.
Nicole Kidman, never one to shy from explicit nudity or sexuality, goes as far down that path as she has traveled since Eyes Wide Shut .
Oddly, though, Kidman's role as a rather distant doctor/wife to cardiac surgeon/ex-alcoholic (Colin Farrell) plays quite similarly to the one she did for Stanley Kubrick in "Eyes Wide Shut."
Kidman, for her part, might remind you of “Eyes Wide Shut,” particularly when she strips down for some mildly kinky marital hanky-panky.
Right from the start, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” wants to let you know that you are in the hands of a master filmmaker and indeed, it is as exquisitely composed from a formal standpoint as one could possibly hope for—with its long tracking shots and offbeat compositions, deliberately measured pacing, oddball erotic content and the oddly ritualistic manner in which the characters talk amongst themselves, not to mention the presence of Nicole Kidman in the cast, there are times when it almost plays like a spiritual sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.”
Kidman once again brings her expert bearing that finds the normalcy in outrageous situations (see Eyes Wide Shut, Dogville, Bewitched, and The Beguiled for examples).
Instead, the cumulative effect feels like a scene in A Clockwork Orange, another Kubrick film, where its hero watches violence with his eyes pried open.
His caustic, often disturbing style shows shades of Stanley Kubrick a la A Clockwork Orange and the best moments of both The Lobster and The Killing of A Sacred Deer are flat out brilliant.
But much like Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Barry Lyndon or The Shining, the longer I watched the more I wanted to know more.
It's also the kind of casually brutal film that brings to mind Euro assaults like Michael Haneke's "Funny Games."
Aparece el dilema aterrador con el que el director austriaco solía deleitarse, sobre todo en la época de “Funny Games” (1997), donde estableció un nuevo y perverso modelo para agitar las emociones de la audiencia.
That said, it’s hardly your conventional horror movie, and people aren’t exactly running out to identify with sadistic no-win hypothetical scenarios (there’s a reason hardly anyone went to see Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games” when he remade it in the States).
Lars von Trier (“Breaking the Waves”), Michael Haneke (“Funny Games”), and Ulrich Seidl (“Import Export”) are clearly Lanthamos’s idols, but he doesn’t possess the intellectual or practical rigor of those established filmmakers.
The cool detachment of Lanthimos’ approach owes a great deal to Kubrick, and to the Michael Haneke of “Caché” and “Funny Games.”
He’s manipulating us, conning us into accepting something terrible, much like Michael Haneke did when he made his slasher flick send-up Funny Games—and then made Funny Games again, in English.
The sins of the patriarchs and the prices to be paid are themes older than the Bible and as relevant as the bourgeoisie; Haneke’s “Cache” (2005) and Ruben Ostlund’s “Force Majeure” (2014) are just two recent films to hoist smug family men on their own petards.
The cool detachment of Lanthimos’ approach owes a great deal to Kubrick, and to the Michael Haneke of “Caché” and “Funny Games.”
Mr. Lanthimos’s techniques — a hovering, prying camera, an atmosphere of chilly, cerebral detachment — owe a debt to the films of Michael Haneke , in particular those like “Cache” and “Funny Games” that subject the guilty conscience of the bourgeoisie to painful deep-tissue massage.
“You’re not a god,” Steven is mocked by Andie MacDowell’s Rita on TV in Groundhog Day, one of the visual punchlines giggling from the mise en scène.
For much of the first hour, Lanthimos and co-writer Efthymis Filippou keep us speculating on what’s going on between them, especially when we see Steven nestling down for a cosy night’s viewing of Groundhog Day with Martin’s mother (a very droll cameo from Alicia Silverstone).
Partway into The Killing of a Sacred Deer , someone mirthlessly watches a scene from Groundhog Day , that classic comedy about being trapped in a cycle of endless repetition.
Can it be an accident that when the good doctor sits down to watch Groundhog Day with Martin and his mother (Alicia Silverstone), in some sort of twisted matchmaking scheme, all we hear is Andie MacDowell telling Bill Murray that he’s no god?
Martin also invites the doctor to his own, not-so-great home, getting him interested in a movie on TV, “Groundhog Day” chosen specifically by Martin, and going to bed early so that his widowed mother (Alicia Silverstone) can flirt with Steven.
He invites Steven over to his house for dinner with his mother (Alicia Silverstone) and to watch his favorite movie, Groundhog Day.
Then we’re reminded of Fatal Attraction as Martin worms his way deeper into Steven’s life, starts dating Kim, and exhibits stalker-like tendencies.
The viewer, accordingly, is forced to think wronged Anne Archer from Fatal Attraction: How long has this been going on, anyway?
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Acting convincingly, Collin Farrell and Nicole Kidman pair up once again after having collaborated recently in Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled.
Nicole Kidman, an Academy Award-winning actor who just pulled off one of the top performances of her lifetime in Big Little Lies, finds herself disrespectfully billed under Farrell for the second time this year (the first was The Beguiled) as his wife Anna, whose support of her husband starts to falter when the truth comes out.
(Coincidentally, this is the second film this year where she and Farrell have worked together – the other being The Beguiled .)
And now here’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which brings together Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman (only a few months after she chopped his leg off in The Beguiled) as a married couple.
Kidman once again brings her expert bearing that finds the normalcy in outrageous situations (see Eyes Wide Shut, Dogville, Bewitched, and The Beguiled for examples).
…’s “The Beguiled,” a Civil War drama that made plausible accommodation for Farrell’s Irish accent.
Instead, he plays Steven, a heart surgeon in the outwardly authoritative yet inwardly spineless tradition of Dustin Hoffman’s “Straw Dogs” character.
Who, watching S.W.A.T. back in 2003, would have imagined that in far-off 2017 Farrell would be delivering a subdued performance as a weak, tested man that bears comparison to Dustin Hoffman’s work in Straw Dogs?
Even Fritz Lang at his most fatalistic, in films like “ Scarlet Street” (1945) and “ Human Desire ” (1954), allowed his heroes some freedom, if only the freedom to fall for the wrong dame, but Lanthimos’s characters are in lockdown from the start.
Even Fritz Lang at his most fatalistic, in films like “ Scarlet Street” (1945) and “ Human Desire ” (1954), allowed his heroes some freedom, if only the freedom to fall for the wrong dame, but Lanthimos’s characters are in lockdown from the start.
Alessandro, the brutish brother in Marco Bellocchio’s “ Fists in the Pocket ” (1965), claims to be “a volcano of ideas” and shoves his mother off a cliff, while the nameless visitor played by Terence Stamp in Pasolini’s “ Theorem ” (1968) seduces pretty much everyone, leaving his conquests in a state of ruin, catatonia, or ecstasy.
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Developed, produced and financed by the Irish company Element Pictures, The Killing of a Sacred Deer skewers middle-class complacency in similar ways to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s famous Teorema .
Todd Haynes' Safe and The Shining would also pair well with it.