Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has a rather distinctive style. To put it bluntly, it isn’t for everyone. The characters in his films are not exactly likable people you can root for. If anything, his work seems designed to remove any sort of empathy for his protagonists, often done through Lanthimos’s shot choices, scripts that lack anyone worth rooting for, and even just actor delivery. It is seriously not for everybody.
Oh, and then I saw I had, like, three days left to watch The Killing of a Sacred Deer before it left Netflix. I had a rough idea what this one was about, and that helped because, well, this is a weird one.
Cardiologist Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell) has what looks like an ideal family consisting of wife Anna (Nicole Kidman), teenage daughter Kim (Raffey Cassidy), and young son Bob (Sunny Suljic). But he keeps meeting with teenager Martin (Barry Keoghan), taking him to dinner and offering him expensive gifts. He even takes the boy home to dinner to meet his family, and after some strong suggestions from Martin, returns the favor by having dinner at Martin’s home with the boy’s mother (Alicia Silverstone). Martin also keeps showing up at Steven’s job, despite Steven’s insistence that he not do that, but why does Steven keep this kid around anyway?
Well, there is a reason. Martin’s father died somewhat young on the operating table. Steven was the surgeon. As such, Martin has issued a curse to bring about some sort of justice, a curse Steven does not tell anyone about at first. The curse is simple: either Steven kills one member of his family, or they will all gradually get sick and die of a mysterious illness. Steven’s inclination is to not believe it at first, but then Bob’s legs stop working one day, and the boy’s appetite completely disappears. Kim comes down with it next. And, for whatever reason, Martin can’t or won’t remove the curse. So, Steven either has to kill his wife or one of his children, or they all die.
OK, just going by that description alone, the movie is obviously a little weird. But it gets even weirder when factoring in that, for most of the movie, the actors speak in a quick, emotionless tone of voice. Lanthimos used something similar in the equally weird The Lobster, and it really doesn’t matter what the characters are saying, everything comes out the same way. Yes, there are moments when Farrell’s face or another member of the cast shows some feelings, but it rarely comes out in their voices. Heck, the most emotion I heard in a voice came when Martin put on a clip from the movie Groundhog Day. It’s an odd thing, but I did find an explanation for this once, something I think I saw in a YouTube video essay that argued that Lanthimos’s characters are less about them seemingly like real people so much as they are meant to be archetypes of some sort, and that in this case, this is more like the retelling of something of a mythological sort of story than a standard drama of any kind. That would explain a lot: these characters aren’t people. They’re more like breathing symbols.
With that in mind, the movie does work. It explains a lot about what’s happening. This is a movie where characters just casually mention that their teenage daughter started menstruating like it’s normal dinner party conversation, and Steven will just state that it is a known fact that a surgical death is never the fault of the surgeon but can be the fault of the anesthesiologist, something his friend and anesthesiologist partner (Bill Camp) later repeats as the other way around. It’s a movie where the characters do what seems “logical” while somehow not showing even a hitch of a feeling for most of the movie’s runtime. It’s the sort of movie where people are proud of how they eat spaghetti or how their mother makes lemonade. It’s a movie full of distant shots of characters in large rooms by themselves to further isolate them from the audience. Mostly, it’s just kinda weird. It’s well done, but weird, and (once again) not for everyone by a longshot. Normally, I dig those sorts of movies, and I did like this one, but it isn’t close to my favorite.
Grade: B
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