Mise à mort du cerf sacré

It's not "weird" just to be weird, It's trying to show us something discomforting, that conventional movies CAN'T.

While The Killing Of a Sacred Deer will be dismissed by the mainstream, for it's very unconventional acting, pacing, and plot, for other's it offers a discomforting conversation on the dark reality of nature and justice. You aren't supposed to ENJOY it, you are supposed to appreciate it.

The intentionally cold and flat reactions from it's characters will turn many off, but give insight into empathy and trust. The subtraction and skewing of emotion allows us to get a closer look at ourselves and our expectations for coping with threats and loss. It's maddening and incredibly uncomfortable to watch, but that is it's aim and success. You have to stop wanting the movie to be what you want it to be, and start wondering why it is the way it is, if you want to take something away from it.

While the movie doesn't meet it's impact potential by missing some opportunities for heavier moments and more character development, it is still fascinating, challenging, and rewarding for an open mind.

For people that appreciate brain teasers like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mulholland Drive, Borgman, Under The Skin, and Sleeping Beauty.

What a strange filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is. Had I not already seen "The Lobster" (2015) (and have since seen two of his earlier Greek productions), I probably would've been completely taken aback by this one, "The Killing of a Sacred Deer." Like its predecessor, its characters seem to occupy some alternate reality entirely dominated by egocentrism, deviant sex and magical retaliatory justice. Again, the acting is intentionally stilted, and there seem to be archaic literary references. I found the eye-for-an-eye pun of "The Lobster" amusing, but the source of Ancient-to-Classical Greek mythology here is quite a treat for me. At university, I took a class, not unlike the daughter in this movie, that included reading the play "Iphigenia in Aulis" by Euripides and, then, viewing the 1977 film adaptation "Iphigenia" directed by Mihalis Kakogiannis. Unfortunately, the result in "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" is rather muddled.

In the Greek myth, King Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, at the behest of the goddess Artemis to allow him and his troops to proceed on the warpath to fight the Trojans. In some versions, Iphigenia is replaced by a deer, hence the title of this movie. The reason I don't think the effects work as well here as they did in "The Lobster" is because whereas that movie took human shortcomings to absurd extremes, this one takes what was already by modern standards an absurd myth and attempts to make it modern and more ordinary. Gods are dead and replaced by doctors, and if there is a god, apparently, he's a pockmarked teenager seeking revenge for his dead father. I suppose a surgeon's wife role playing during sex as a patient under general anesthesia and a father recalling to his son the time he masturbated his father is more in line with some of the sexual perversity one finds in some Classical Greek literature, though. Yet, overall, it comes across as disjointed. If this were supposed to be a psychological thriller, it seems difficult to lure the spectator in without being able to identify with the characters--whereas this was unnecessary in the black comedy of "The Lobster" (and contradictory to the intent of the Greek movies). But, the stilted acting and illogical premise of the narrative works against identification. I don't think any amount of tense scoring and camera movement from distant perspectives can alleviate that--in a world where nothing is sacred.

P.S. I still don't quite get the point of "Groundhog Day" (1993) as the film-within-the-film. Is it just because characters in both are prisoners of fate or something? I prefer the self-reflexivity of the director's prior "Dogtooth" (2009) and "Alps" (2011).

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.

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.

This is my first Yorgos Lanthimos film and it's also a film I would probably never want to rewatch.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is about Steven, a surgeon, whose family and life takes a turn for the worst after he befriends a teenager named Martin.

This film gave me a very disturbed feeling during it and after it had ended. It's rare to see a film like this being made in such a unique and uncomfortable manner. It shows to me what a different director Lanthimos is and how he stand out from the crowd. From the chilling music to the character interactions, everything provided an uneasy feeling. The way each person spoke kept on freaking me out due to the absurdity of the dialogue and how wooden and emotionless each actor's performance was. It just seemed very unnatural and robotic which sparked this antsy feeling within me.

Another huge part of the film was the music. The music had a very disturbing tone to it which added to the strange atmosphere and increased the anxiety levels. The camerawork was very strange and unlike anything I've seen in a film. Sometimes the camera would be extremely far away from the characters, making them seem very small in comparison to the size of the room. Techniques like these gave a very subtle reminder as to how powerless the family were and it conveyed to me how talented of a filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is.

You can argue that the performances are really bad since everyone had the same monotone, expressionless and wooden dialogue delivery but it's very obvious how intentional this was. Colin Farrell was really good. It's been a while since I saw Nicole Kidman and it felt great to see her perform this well. The star, however, was Barry Keoghan who seemed the most human out of everybody. His character was very interesting and he absolutely killed it in his role.

I'll be checking out Yorgos Lanthimos's other work for sure. This film really got under my skin and didn't leave until it ended. It's not everyone's cup of tea but if you like offbeat movies, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is for you.