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It might not be obvious if you’re not familiar with the career work of director Yorgos Lanthimos, but last year’s The Lobster was very much an outlier for him. Which isn’t to suggest that the bizarrely touching movie about a strange future where single people must find a life partner or else be turned into animals is the only weird movie Lanthimos has ever made. But it may be the only optimistic weird movie Lanthimos has ever made.
With his latest, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which screens at the Toronto International Film Festival this week before opening in theaters on October 27th, Lanthimos is back to dark (often darkly funny) stories about fractured families that linger on humanity’s capacity for deception and petty cruelty.
Dogtooth was Lanthimos’s breakthrough film when it premiered at the Cannes film festival in 2009. The film surrounded an isolated family whose over-protective parents keep their teenage children under their thumb to such a degree that they lie to them about the meaning of simple words and events in order to keep them away from the world. The film was disturbing — violently so at times — but also had a dark spark of humor that kept audiences off-balance. It was a film that demanded attention, and it received an incredibly unlikely Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 2010.
Lanthimos followed Dogtooth up with Alps, which picked up the thread of Dogtooth‘s manufactured reality, telling the story of an organization of people who provide a service to grieving families by essentially acting as temporary stand-ins for the deceased, until the families are ready to let go. You could see how a concept like that might’ve turned into something twee in another director’s hands, but Lanthimos focused on how pettiness and obsession among the various stand-ins could result in something upsetting and ominous. Alps wasn’t as good as Dogtooth, but it was good enough to deserve better than the shrugged shoulders it got from the film community. Lanthimos was still respected, but he wasn’t hot anymore.
That all changed with The Lobster, easily Lanthimos’s most popular and wide-reaching film. Having a star like Colin Farrell helped, sure, but also that the story — while still deeply bizarre and dark in its own ways — felt ultimately hopeful about its characters and the general concept of finding love. Eschewing his theme of fraudulent families, The Lobster felt the closest to a “normal” story, even with all its human-to-animal transformations, than Lanthimos had ever made.
And now here’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which brings together Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman (only a few months after she chopped his leg off in The Beguiled) as a married couple. He’s a surgeon, she’s an ophthalmologist, they have two kids and a huge house. Obviously, Yorgos Lanthimos is going to fuck them up. Immediately, the movie is aggressively jangling your nerves. Everything from the music (loudly urgent) to the camera angles and movement (severe) is telling you something is about to go wrong. Perhaps something has already gone wrong.
Lanthimos’s obsession with families continues. We initially see Farrell — sporting a beard that is positively Clooney-in-Syriana-esque — sharing some father/son moments with teenage Martin (Barry Keoghan). Farrell’s character, Stephen, speaks with a stiff, aloof manner; he’s open but not warm. Martin’s awkward too, of course, and you wonder if it’s just a family trait. But Lanthimos pulls the rug out early on: Stephen isn’t Martin’s father, but there’s some kind of bond there that nobody’s talking about. And Lanthimos’s aesthetics are screaming at us that something is terribly wrong.
Without giving away plot points, there’s something dark at the center of The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and after we meet Stephen’s real family (Kidman as his wife, Anna, plus a teenage daughter Kim and mop-topped grade-schooler Bob), and after Martin meets Stephen’s family, things start to go wrong. Young Bob’s legs go numb one morning, and nobody knows why. Kim is also acting strangely. And before long, Stephen is faced with some horrifically hard choices in order to keep his family safe.
The horror at the heart of this film creeps up slowly, and then is laid bare all at once. Lanthimos keeps the audience in the dark until they know almost too much. It builds up a frustration with Stephen, who knows what’s happening to his children (and what might soon happen to his wife) but doesn’t seem to be doing enough (or anything at first) to help them.
Predictably, a crisis with the children drives a wedge between Stephen and Anna, but Kidman isn’t given the hysterical wife to play. She’s almost unsettlingly under control at times, which is a great Kidman mode to be in. As she and Farrell move into more intense circumstances and further away from each other, it’s thrilling to watch them face off.
Martin, meanwhile, starts off as enigmatic, even pitiable — there is one spectacularly awkward scene with Alicia Silverstone as his mother. We know he doesn’t have a father, and that portends its own ill tidings, but at an early point in the films, my notes actually read, “Martin seems odd/awkward but otherwise fine.” My assessment was premature. Barry Keoghan gives a truly unsettling performance, mostly in affectless monotone (he kind of reminded me of a teenage Mike Birbiglia? Making me now want to see Birbiglia in a darker role). It’s almost hard to believe he’s the same actor who played the innocent town kid who got onto Mark Rylance’s boat in Dunkirk. Here, he reminded me of the kids in Elephant.
Ultimately, The Killing of a Sacred Deer takes the audience into some dark places, and it’s already proving to be divisive. Which is more than understandable. The movie feels like it should be setting up a morality play, for Farrell and Kidman’s characters at the very least. But in the end, there is no moral decision that makes any sense. Nor is there a logical solution that the audience could holler at Farrell about. Lanthimos puts his characters into a strait jacket where there are no good decisions to be made. And the audience is just left to watch them writhe. If that’s not your thing, you’ll probably have some company. But it’s a wicked, unsettling ride while it lasts.
