The Killing of a Sacred Deer * * * * *

Martin brings illnesses beyond the good Doctors comprehension.

   Yorgos Lanthimos is the same director that gave us The Lobster.  Interestingly this film is not quite as absurd.  He seems to have wound things back rather than upped the ante.

This time we are not cast into the future or some kind of parallel universe. The story is clearly set in this world, and in this modern day, which in some respects makes it more disturbing.

          A respected surgeon is regularly meeting a young man called Martin.  Martin has a very persuasive personality. He doesn’t throw tantrums, he doesn’t make a scene, he just gets what he wants through unswerving insistence.

        He visits the surgeon at the hospital and at the surgeon's home.  He develops a relationship with the surgeons teenage daughter, he wins the favour of the surgeons impressionable young son.  

         As the story progresses we learn that Martin does not have a father, and the absence of his father has something to do with the surgeon.

        Martin makes prophetic pronouncements - there is to be a curse upon the surgeons family - which are like plagues from the Gods, and there is only one thing that can be done to prevent them coming true. In retribution for the loss of his own father an unspeakable sacrifice is called for from the surgeon.

        The concept is silly - a sixteen year old boy ingratiating himself into the life of a an empowered respected surgeon, it’s completely dismissable -  until you watch it.

       Like The Lobster, Yorgos Lanthimos has a way of making the absurd perfectly acceptable. You don’t find yourself scoffing, you find yourself frightened, intrigued and concerned.  Even the language is hypnotic.  There is a natural unnaturalness in the way they speak to each other.  Very direct sentences, often absent of subtlety and nuances. Sentences constructed so they cannot carry secondary meanings or an envelope of lies.

        And once you are a believer you are ready to accept the madness the film descends into.

        There is a telling scene, so simple, almost incongruously inserted where the surgeon visits the principal of the school his children attend.  “Which of my children do you prefer?” he asks the principal, as though such a question is natural.  By way of response the Principal mentions their individual merits, including the excellent essay his daughter wrote on Iphigenia. (Call me slow, but it wasn’t until that point that the penny dropped, including the title …. Doh!   By way of excuse I will say I read nothing about this film before I went to see it.)  It’s full of beautiful symbols from the Greeks: gifts exchanged, songs which are sung, surreptitious meetings, cruel demands, moral turpitude and strange ailments.

        The locations and photography should be mentioned: seductively inviting, like pages from a magazine the locations are believable and impossibly clean - like the surgeon's hands which frequently get referred to.

       The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a fabulous film, frightening and captivating. Great performance from Colin Farrell who collaborated with Lanthimos on The Lobster (and also with Nicole Kidman in The Beguiled).  Nicole Kidman is wonderful (she rarely puts a foot wrong in the roles she takes on these days), and Barry Keoghan as the boy Martin is brilliant and appropriately disturbing.
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