The Killing of a Sacred Deer

This poorly written and badly directed movie from Oscar nominee (for "The Favourite") Yorgos Lanthimos is yet another Emperor's New Clothes example of bad contemporary cinema. You can fool some of the people some of the time...

As often is the case during a bad movie, my mind started to wander and I thought about Ed Norton's breakthrough film "Primal Fear", a suspense thriller featuring a memorable war of wills with Richard Gere. In "Deer" we have Barry Keoghan reminding me of Norton, but giving a rote, clumsy performance. For director Yorgos, niceties like believable acting, believable characters and attempts to help the viewer suspend disbelief are way too cornball for him to attempt, instead substituting his tiresome Theater of the Absurd antics.

In contemporary porn, wedded to internet streaming as the mode of delivery, a set-up for a scene/video lasts a minute or two to establish some dumb stag movie type premise, and then it's on to the races for a half hour or so of nonstop explict sex action. In "Deer" Yorgos takes an hour, fully half of the movie to shaggy-dog build up his absurd supernatural premise, during which the cast walks through their roles like zombies.

Nonsensical second half, with its absurd violence and ridiculous sexual innuendo (Nicole Kidman's off-screen hand-job for example) traps the characters with zero degrees of freedom, making their actions subject to "fate" or some pretentious appeal to Euripedes and Greek myth. It's not interesting watching them go through the motions and none of the scenes are credible. Under the guise of avant-garde filmmaking, we get hackwork. Oh, for a great filmmaker like a Sidney Lumet (with scores of great movies about conflict and war of wills, my favorite perhaps not the Pacino classics but Sean Connery in "The Offence"), not the trendy hacks of today's cinema.

Eh it wasn't horrible, but I wouldn't watch it again. It was very disturbing, unsettling and weird. The film had me guessing at every sec. Perhaps those are elements of a good film? I give it thumbs up for being able to reach within and for making me feel that, but its not the experience I was looking for. Entertaining film but in a way most people might not enjoy.

Yes, this movie is weird, and it's entirely intentional.

Yorgos Lanthimos is an interesting Greek director who's been making English language films for a few years. The Lobster is so dry and oddball that I ended up kind of loving it. The Favourite I ended up loving because it was able to most effectively balance its weirdness with its characters (perhaps because he didn't actually write this script as opposed to everything else he's directed).

The Killing of A Sacred Deer is the movie he made in between the two listed above, and I think it might be the weakest of the three. Good instead of very good, that is.

So, let me talk about the weirdness. Everything about this movie feels stilted and mannered. It's off putting, especially at the beginning when you're trying to figure out what on earth the movie actually is. As the story progresses, though, it's easy to see the nefarious undercurrents running through every scene. We spend the first half of the movie trying to figure out where this unease originates from, and the fact that everyone is delivering unnatural dialogue unnaturally heightens the feeling.

I've seen so many complaints of unnatural dialogue over the years. The one example strongest in my mind is around the movie Juno. The complaints of the mannered way in which characters spoke seemed to be a mask for complaints about the rest of the movie that people couldn't figure out how to express, so they picked on the dialogue. I'm not saying that criticism of such writing is invalid or always misdirected, but that did seem to be the trend I noticed and continue to notice in such criticisms. Just because dialogue isn't reflective of how people actually speak (I like to think of Mamet), that doesn't mean that the dialogue is a failure. Oftentimes, it's that way for a reason.

Anyway, back to the movie. The sense of unease that permeates the film is great, and I kind of loved the film for about the first three-quarters. However, once the plot began to unravel and resolve, I felt like the movie lost some of its edge. When the main character is presented with his great moral choice (and his blackly comedic method for resolving it), I felt more removed from the choice than I should have. The build up is what works best in this movie, while the resolution just simply doesn't gel as well.

Still, the movie's an odd but entertaining little thriller.

I'm usually a fan of independent or concept films much like this one. I love Greek mythology and what could be considered as surrealist films, they are some of my favourite in fact but whilst this film is shot beautifully and has some great music, by the end of the film, I just couldn't see more in it than as a pretentious mess which has an interesting concept but entirely wastes it in the effort to be considered as strange.

I won't go into the story because its simple and like Eraserhead, its the least interesting part of the movie. Unlike Eraserhead, however, it actually has no subtext to back up the reason for creating the movie rather than adapting Greek myths into the modern day. It's a simple revenge story with supernatural themes that is never explained but is only shown to the smallest of degrees. This tell don't show is also a big reason for why I couldn't get into the movie. It tells you about this briefly but it never goes into that story to any significant degree, not even in a way to keep it subtle.

The worst part really is that there's some very good scenes that get their very disturbing feeling but the pacing and how dramatized to the extreme some of the other scenes are, I just couldn't take the movie seriously for a big portion of the run time. It's even worse because I wanted to love this movie, maybe I should give it another try and think it over a bit more but I just keep questioning why it just didn't interest me in the characters or the story which just makes the surreal and disturbing elements feeling just feel like filler.

In short, I didn't hate it but couldn't like it or love it even as a huge lover of art-film and surrealist film in general. Maybe it just wasn't just right for me. There's scenes I like, the beginning is great but as it went along, I just got less interested with each passing minute of the film's progression. All this ending with a diner scene so pretentious that it nearly ruined the whole movie for me, it was just film-student like quality in a film that started off incredibly unique and interesting. But even though a film is unique and can be disturbing doesn't mean that its good and here it sadly wasn't the case, at least in my opinion.

This is probably going to be a controversial review but I expected so much more from this director from his other work but this just disappointed me more and more as it went along.

This is definitely not one for everyone and that's okay, sure, but to assign it a 1-star or 2-star rating as some have done, is just ridiculous, especially when the disconnect certainly is on the side of the viewer. In fact, those who deemed the acting 'bad' (one reviewer notes: "I thought the characters were robots") missed the entire point of the film.

While, admittedly, the acting from the girl who plays the daughter is flawed, both the acting from the rest of the cast and the way in which the story unfolds is purposefully meant to make you feel highly uncomfortable - and it succeeds.

From the very first scene, to where your mind goes in regard to the sexual nature of the relationships, to the inappropriate or generally eyebrow-raising topics of discussion between some of the characters, this film is MEANT to BE "creepy" and to make the viewer FEEL odd, off - and even dirty.

Much of the creepy-factor, if you will, comes PRECISELY FROM the amazing way in which most of these talented actors made these characters come across as disturbing, unappealing, ALMOST like most of us, ALMOST worth sympathizing with, but not quite. It would have lost much as a film of this nature had the acting been that of a normal or run-of-the-mill family). Again, EVERYTHING, from the topics of conversations, to their postures, to their almost detached delivery, was purposeful and meant to lend to the eeriness of the film and the discomfort of the viewer. THINK about it for a moment: have you ever watched Colin Farrell NOT deliver an enthusiastic, almost convivial performance? The departure from his easy affability in other roles, and almost apathetic delivery in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, was purposeful, and necessary to drive the uncomfortable narrative deep into the viewers minds. This is the very same reason (among many others) one particular character sings - eerily. The viewing experience had to be uncomfortable.

While The Killing of a Sacred Deer may not go down as a family favorite or as one we watch over and over, it is definitely engrossing for its running time and more importantly, it isn't the thousands of other films on hundreds of streaming sites with nothing to say for itself. In short, for those who specifically look for and enjoy films which are not the standard fare, this one is a should-watch.

7.6/8.