The world is a tire fire and everything is deeply disturbing, so hey, let’s slap on our clown noses and have a good time with folks who brought us Dogtooth and The Lobster, whaddaya say?!
The Killing of a Sacred Deer is the latest from director Yorgos Lanthimos and co-writer Efthymis Filippou, whose earlier films walk a very thin line between dark comedy and total fucking existential despair. Their latest looks very much in that mold, with returning Lobster star Colin Farrell and his Beguiled co-star Nicole Kidman as a surgeon and wife whose delicate familial dynamic is upset by a peculiar 16-year-old boy (Barry Keoghan). That’s the plot I gathered from reviews, however; this is the best kind of teaser, in which precious little is revealed plot-wise, but we’re told everything we need to know about the picture’s mood, tone, and feel. Take a look:
Lanthimos’s work to date has been, to put it mildly, divisive; responses to Sacred Deer were much the same when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival back in May. The Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang captured the scope of it in his review, which concluded: “The Killing of a Sacred Deer is sensationally well made, close to Kubrickian in its visual and sonic precision. It is also, to these eyes, an increasingly and dispiritingly empty provocation as it goes on… As the bleakest, most uncompromising expression of an auteur’s vision, the result is pretty much pure, unfiltered Lanthimos — and in the future I think I’ll take him impure and filtered, thank you very much.”
Judge for yourself when The Killing of a Sacred Deer hits theaters on October 27.