The Killing of a Sacred Deer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQFdGfwChtw

To watch a film by Greek filmmaker Giorgos Lanthimos, you need to get rid out of logical thinking and accept that facts are just like he portray them. If you question this, or if you try to find answers within reason, you will just lose the experience. It's as if we were watching an hyper-realist science fiction film, because as contradictory as it sounds, that's the best way to describe Lanthimos' cinema.

When we face strange aliens or ghosts in a fantasy or horror movie, we just don't question their existence, they fit in the world that their authors have created. But Lanthimos uses cold clinical realism as his directorial approach, specially in the performances, they act the way that people around our life do, with very minimal expression changes and sparse dialogue. When the history and the characters inhabit a universe so similar to ours, our brain will just scratch with anxiety when non-realist facts appear, but that's where the genius in Lanthimos' stories lies.

In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a doctor befriends the son of one of his patients who died during a surgery, but suddenly this kid tells him that, one by one, his children and his wife will start getting some dreadful conditions (being unable to move their legs, lost of all appetite, and finally bleeding through their eyes) that will lead to their death unless he kills one of them first (his choice of which one to kill), as an act of revenge for the death of the boy's father. Like ourselves, our characters just find this unbelievable and start to look for medical explanations, but soon they'll have to face that everything will happen just as the boy described, and it is pointless to find an explanation.

The screenplay is brilliant, it just develops the characters in formidable ways until they face the ultimate fatality, as if it is a Greek tragedy set in contemporary world. And the way that Lanthimos directs his cast is brilliant, all the performances are great, and the actors in the family keep the realism in their characters' evolution, Nicole Kidman is nailing her acting come-back streak, and Colin Farrell is evolving as an actor so much that we're about to forget his questionable beginnings. This family is thorn up, and is forced to go to their animal instincts, but they managed to do it in such a contained way that aligns with the tone of the overall film. As a contrast, Barry Keoghan as the teen sadistic avenger, is played in such an ambiguous way that is terrifying (think We Need to Talk About Kevin style); it's a puzzling character that deserves a good psychological analysis (he forces his revenge upon the doctor who killed his father, but he seems to really look up on him, and even suggest that he could be a good fit for his now widower mother.

Lanthimos shows that he has worked on his easthetics, and the cinematography on this film might be very well the best one in all his career, with such a formality and coldness that add to the general tension of the film. The work on the music is also remarkable, strident and dissonant to punctuate the decadence and the horrible implications that the screenplay reveals.

It is an unsettling film that demands a lot form the audience and that will drag you to the darkest places of humanity, as long as you cooperate with the absurd game proposed by the director. Lanthimos is proving to be a worthy heir of the Greek tragic tradition, and also an author that is creating a very personal style that stands in between Lars Von Trier, the Coens and John Carpenter. It's a hard film to see, a strange psychological horror movie that digs deep on the human mind through this painful sacrifice that needs to be committed.