Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer “makes the absurd, amazing The Lobster seem like a warm and cuddly experience by comparison,” declares Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “A film of clean hands, cold heart, and near-Satanic horror, it was garlanded with boos at its Cannes press screening and it is absolutely fucking brilliant. Part of what makes its deep-freeze, suburban soul-sickness so effective is that, although the studied formalism, deterministically stiff performance style and deliberately flat line readings are instantly recognizable Lanthimosian traits, the film is set in a world that’s only a plate-glass sliver of weirdness away from our own.”
“Reuniting with his Lobster director, Colin Farrell plays a surgeon, husband, and father of two whose placid domestic life is slowly, insidiously disrupted by the persistent demands of a teenage boy (Barry Keoghan) hovering in his periphery,” writes the A.V. Club’s A. A. Dowd. “It’d be unfair to say much more about the relationship, but the film unfolds like an alternate-reality stalker thriller, like a twisted slow-burn Cape Fear, only with an element of the fantastic that Lanthimos boldly refuses to explain. . . . Nicole Kidman, in one of her gazillion appearances at this year’s Cannes, finds plenty of human dimension as the doctor’s increasingly infuriated wife.”
“This is Lanthimos’s most scattered and sedate film, but it’s his scariest as well,” finds IndieWire’s David Ehrlich. “This is a film that draws from more influences than a sui generis talent like Lanthimos ever has before, and shades of everything from Birth to Blue Velvet to David Cronenberg’s early body horror can be found in this suburban nightmare, which alternates between the sterile hallways of Steven’s hospital and the immaculate interiors of the upper-class house that he shares with his wife and their two kids, Kim and Bob (Raffey Cassidy and Sunny Suljic).”
“It’s an intriguing, disturbing, amusing twist on something which in many ways could be a conventional horror-thriller from the 1970s or 1980s, or even a bunny-boiler nightmare from the 90s,” suggests the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “There is a strident orchestral score, nightmarish fish-eye shooting angles, down low and up high, and people walking along corridors in such a way that makes forward movement feel like slo-mo falling.”
“In the tradition of Ringu or the Final Destination films, it first tells you what dreadful fate awaits its characters, then lets you spend the rest of the film agonizing over when it will go down,” writes Emily Yoshida at Vulture. “The cinematography, by frequent collaborator Thimios Bakatakis, is exquisitely icy and built on long, slow pushes and pulls. I’m not sure if Lanthimos has much to say here that hasn’t already been said by Luis Buñuel or Michael Haneke (at this very festival, no less) or any other bards of bourgeois hypocrisy, but still: To see an unfettered nightmare like this from such an idiosyncratic director feels like a cruel treat, and a welcome stylistic stretch.”
For the Irish Times’ Donald Clarke, this film’s “nightmarish, Old Testament horrors are unshakable. . . . Lanthimos is not quite a surrealist, but his universe is sufficiently skewed for the main characters to accept the logically outrageous when it arrives. Lanthimos’s tone is closer to that of Pinter than Ionesco.”
Jonathan Romney for Screen: “Another disconnect, characteristic of Lanthimos, comes from the language, with outright banalities (running-gag conversations about wristwatches) being delivered by the cast with the same matter-of-fact impassivity as life-or-death themes or outrageous transgressive confessions. This leaves us wondering whether the small talk is just inconsequential or obscurely significant—a dilemma we’re teased with when, after one character commits an act of self-harm, he announces, ‘It’s metaphorical.’”
In the Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney notes that “the escalating horror as the action continues is magnified in its power by being so muted. Lanthimos and sound designer Johnnie Burn (whose work on Jonathan Glazer's spellbinding Under the Skin was similarly essential to the movie's hold) layer in eclectic music choices, from jagged punk to portentous classical to the abstract strings and percussion pieces of Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina and the haunted sounds of György Ligeti.”
“As allegories of extreme discomfort go, this one is masterfully orchestrated,” agrees Variety’s Peter Debruge. What’s more, “Farrell and Kidman are astonishingly gifted at playing the subtext of every scene.”
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