The Killing of a Sacred Deer

A typically oddball effort from Yorgos Lanthimos, The Killing of a Sacred Deer follows Colin Farrell’s heart surgeon Steven Murphy as his unusual friendship with a young man (Barry Keoghan’s Martin) begins to have an unexpected (and increasingly sinister) impact on his life and family. Filmmaker Lanthimos kicks the proceedings off with a close-up shot of heart surgery and the movie segues into a sterile, almost Kubrickian drama, with the slow-moving narrative augmented with a whole host of expectedly off-the-wall elements and instances of dialogue (eg two characters engage in a conversation about body hair). And although Lanthimos’ striking visual sensibilities consistently elevate one’s interest, The Killing of a Sacred Deer suffers from an overly lackadaisical execution that essentially (and effectively) holds one at arm’s length almost from start to finish. The viewer’s patience does, as a result, begin to seriously wane as time slowly progresses (ie it’s a long, long wait for the movie to actually start being about something), although, by that same token, there’s little doubt that things improve immeasurably as the spare story takes a decidedly sinister turn at around the midway point. It’s clear, though, that the promise of this admittedly off-the-wall second-act twist is eventually squandered by Lanthimos, with the film’s latter half, perhaps inevitably, succumbing to precisely the sort of meandering uneventfulness that undercut the impact of the opening stretch. The end result is a cinematic experiment that ultimately doesn’t quite work, and one can’t help but hope that Lanthimos will someday put his unique approach to work in a story that’s as compelling as his aesthetic sensibilities.

** out of ****