The Killing of a Sacred Deer – first look review

Yor­gos Lan­thi­mos’ fourth fea­ture has an entic­ing – and there­fore mis­lead­ing – title. The Killing of a Sacred Deer ini­tial­ly presents itself as a sleek hor­ror riff on the Greek director’s usu­al social themes, but all is lost mid­way through fol­low­ing a key reveal. From then on, nar­ra­tive events give way to men­ac­ing track­ing shots and close-ups of beau­ti­ful faces, only occa­sion­al­ly leav­ened by mor­bid humour.

Col­in Far­rell plays a well-to-do sur­geon with a sex­u­al­ly game wife (Nicole Kid­man) and two strik­ing blue-eyed sprogs (Raf­fey Cas­sidy and Sun­ny Suljic). The Sur­geon has reg­u­lar ren­dezvous with a boy named Mar­tin (Bar­ry Keoghan), who is close to his daughter’s age. He lav­ish­es the boy with father­ly atten­tion, bring­ing him presents and treat­ing him like a sur­ro­gate child. The only ques­tion is, ​‘why?’

Pre-reveal, the mys­tery of who Mar­tin is, and where his omi­nous pushi­ness will lead, hints at a sleep­ing beast soon to awake and take the sto­ry to a new dimen­sion. This antic­i­pa­tion laces intrigue into super­fi­cial­ly absorb­ing stylings and makes fleet­ing odd­ness feel like part of a big­ger arc.

Lan­thi­mos and his reg­u­lar scriptwriter, Efthymis Fil­ip­pou, rev­el in smalltalk, high­light­ing the com­ic banal­i­ty of every­day exchanges via their estab­lished tech­nique of hav­ing char­ac­ters speak in monot­o­ne. Peo­ple ask where they might buy a watch, or say they will make a lemon cake tomor­row, or announce their daugh­ter has begun menstruating.

The awak­en­ing of the beast, how­ev­er, proves to be a false dawn – for hav­ing coughed up a cliched rev­e­la­tion, it falls straight back to sleep, imbu­ing the rest of the film with a narcoleptic’s sense of urgency.

Lan­thi­mos’ bril­liant 2009 film, Dog­tooth, intro­duced audi­ences to his sig­na­ture style of direct­ing actors to per­form robot­i­cal­ly. The film worked because he allowed dra­ma to seep in, char­ac­ters to devel­op. The end­ing had mean­ing. None of this is true of The Killing of a Sacred Deer, in which the drained per­son­al­i­ties of the char­ac­ters serve to relieve the film of all dra­mat­ic tension.