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| Author | Zoe Aresti |
Digital Cinema Media's Partnerships Manager, Adam Reynolds, reviews The Killing of a Sacred Deer from the 61st BFI London Film Festival.
Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, has already caused a stir at Cannes and TIFF amongst critics, with his darkest and most twisted work to date. Previous works Dogtooth and The Lobster were relatable human stories, whilst Sacred Deer is deliberately isolating with scant opportunity to attach our emotions to the frost – tipped characters.
Like Aronofsky’s mother!, the film is a patchwork of Biblical allusion, crowned with a supernatural element reminiscent of a Grimm’s fairy-tale curse. Lanthimos honours his heritage with this Greek Tragedy of a story, based on Euripides’ works on Agamemnon and the agonising decision he has to make to save his kingdom.
Colin Farrell, who delivered an exceptional performance in The Lobster, leads Lanthimos’ cast once more, this time playing a cardiology surgeon, who seems to lack a heart himself. Out of the operating room, Farrell’s dialogue is formulaic and delivered without empathy, going through the motions of humanity without truly feeling. This extends to awkward family conversations around the dinner table with his wife [Nicole Kidman] and two children, played by excellent newcomers Raffey Cassidy and Sunny Suljic.
Lanthimos collaborates with his regular cinematographer, Thimios Bakatakis, who delivers lingering, panning shots that Kubrick perfected in The Shining to disorientate the viewer and instil a sense of implicity in the horrors that unfold on screen.
The film, as with Greek theatre, is delivered in two acts, the first exploring Farrell’s souring friendship with a deceased patient’s teenage son, played to menacing perfection by Dunkirk star Barry Keoghan. The second culminates in a sequence that is a darkly comic homage to Haneke’s Funny Games. To go into any detail on the plot would be sacrilegious; Lanthimos’ idiosyncratic works are best enjoyed as an abstract thrill ride.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer reasserts Lanthimos as a great storyteller of our time.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer is released by Curzon Artificial Eye on Friday 3 November