It's just one of the weirdest, coolest movies around. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a loose adaptation of a Greek tragedy, but you'd probably know that even if it wasn't mentioned in the movie. There's something profoundly sad and absurd about it that's deeply theatrical and feels Just, in an archaic sort of way.
The film concerns a heart surgeon (Colin Farrell) who befriends a young man (Barry Keoghan), though their relationship is left mysterious for about a third of the movie. It turns out that the doctor had operated on the boy's father after a car accident and he had died. The boy blames the surgeon for destroying his family, and now says the surgeon will have to kill a member of his own family to balance his crime. Until he does so, each member of his family will suffer and die, one by one. When the surgeon's youngest child is suddenly paralyzed, the horrors begin.
While at first we hate the young man, whose creepy and awkward interactions do little to endear him to anyone, we eventually learn too that the surgeon is a former alcoholic, which may have played a part in the death. All that began with violence will end in violence, and moral disarray is cast out of thought by the presence of a primal, blood-for-blood sense of justice. It's a gripping story, and in the hands of writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster), it's a weird, wacky, totally fascinating work of psychological horror.
The performances, especially those of Farrell and Nicole Kidman, are masterful works of deadpan humor. Much like them, the director seems to handle everything with a morbid sense of comedy that grows more perverse as things get dark and dangerous. That doesn't make it any less brutal or brooding, but it does make you feel worse for enjoying it. Lanthimos, for all his curious and flamboyant style, doesn't undermine the story with his antics; rather, he pours in his creative energies into the slower parts of the film to make them spectacular, and when the drama kicks into high gear, he simply lets it go for the guns. It's a cool, calculated, and totally awesome method of moviemaking in a film all about cruelty and desperation.
IMDb: The Killing of a Sacred Deer
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