FARRELL, KIDMAN ENDURE CRUCIBLE OF SUFFERING
Animal corpses tend to pile up with alarming regularity in the films of Yorgos Lanthimos — just ask the cat in “Dogtooth,” or the dog in “The Lobster.” (You can’t, sorry. They’re dead.) So imagine my surprise that no antlered beasts are slaughtered in “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” a lightly blood-spattered but technically immaculate nightmare of a movie that invites us to cackle alongside its director into the void.
The title, thankfully, is not a plot summary but a reference to the tale of Agamemnon, who killed a deer from Artemis’ grove and was ordered to sacrifice his own daughter as a punishment. Even without that knowledge, you might be able to divine the story’s mythological roots — not just because Lanthimos hails from Greece and has a regionally specific taste for tragedy, but also because his films often play like behavioral experiments devised by unfathomably cruel gods.
Colin Farrell, who starred in “The Lobster,” is back for more high-toned punishment and bizarre ultimatums in “Sacred Deer,” this time playing a man who has long since settled down. His Steven Murphy is a heart surgeon with an optometrist wife, Anna (Nicole Kidman), two bright, well-behaved kids and a large suburban mansion. It’s a world that looks a lot like ours (the film was shot in Cincinnati) but, as always with Lanthimos, refuses to sound anything like it.
This is due not only to the soundtrack, with its shuddering violins and its mighty choral blasts of Schubert, Bach and Ligeti, but also to the flat, stilted rhythms and deadpan non sequiturs of the characters’ speech. You might be slightly bewildered by an early scene in which Steven and his anesthesiologist (Bill Camp) dwell at length on the subject of wristwatches, specifically the merits of metal and leather straps. But things advance to another level of creepiness when Steven has a slightly different version of the same conversation with Martin (a superb Barry Keoghan), a teenager whom he occasionally meets for visits at and outside the hospital.
Are they speaking in code? Are the watch straps meant to signify something, like the inescapable grip of time? Even after two viewings, I have no idea. My suspicion is that they signify nothing, except perhaps the banality of small talk. This becomes clear when Steven, showing Martin an almostuntoward degree of attention, invites him over to the house for dinner.
Once Martin returns the favor and invites Steven over for dinner with him and his mother (Alicia Silverstone), his demands on the surgeon’s time become ever more insistent, his random hospital visits increasingly unwelcome. Amid so much inexplicable menace, perhaps the most eerily credible subplot involves the Murphys’ 14-year-old daughter, Kim (Raffey Cassidy), who develops an intense, gently requited crush on Martin. Meanwhile, their 12-yearold son, Bob (Sunny Suljic), is suddenly immobilized by a mysterious illness, the origins and implications of which baffle Steven and his medical colleagues.
I’m reluctant to say much more about the plot, which is at once deeply twisted and startlingly straightforward. In any case, while the Murphys’ fate may be of enormous consequence to them Lanthimos himself seems less interested in what happens than in how it happens. With cunning precision and a nastiness that seeps into the movie like a slow-acting poison, he turns a domesticmedical nightmare into a feverish exercise in style.
The atmosphere quivers with menace, and the threat of ghastly violence seems to lurk behind every impeccably lighted corner. Lanthimos signals his intentions with an early shot of Steven taking off his stained surgical gloves, as direct an indication as any of a man with blood on his hands. And in Farrell’s soulfully stoic performance, Steven becomes a convenient stand-in for white male complacency, the moral idiocy and cowardice bred by a life of Western privilege.
But as it marches its characters ever so slowly toward a suitably despairing climax, the movie feels increasingly like a selfsatisfied but unsustained provocation, a rich display of craft in service of secondhand shocks and ideas. Lanthimos effectively strikes the same harsh, dissonant chord for two hours, and it’s a virtuoso performance, even if “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” winds up feeling closer to monotony than myth.