By Jake Howell jake.howell@utoronto.ca

Cannes Review: KILLING OF A SACRED DEER

SACRED DEER

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is Yorgos Lanthimos’ grandest achievement yet, a huge film in so many ways. But that vastness coud prove insurmountable by those turned off by the bite of Dogtooth or snap of The Lobster.

For those who embraced those beasts with bloodied arms, this A24 film is also the most accessible film by Lanthimos and his regular co-writer Efthymis Filippou. Squeamish be damned: his follow-up Competition bow begins with a clinical close-up of open-heart surgery and ends with, well… just the opposite, really (if I can be vague enough as to imply what a heartbreaking Lanthimos ending can look like).

This theme of hearts—loved ones, the idea that family ties are quantifiable—is what Sacred Deer canters satirically on throughout its 109 minutes. The plot, while easily summarized, is characteristically mysterious: after a death on his operating table, the children of cardiologist Steven (Colin Farrell) begin to experience inexplicable illnesses, beginning with paralysis and leading to loss of appetite.

Baffling his medical colleagues as they run studies, the curse that’s getting worse seems to be stemming from Martin (Barry Keoghan), the strange, teenaged son of Steven’s late patient, who Steven had befriended following the funeral as a sign of humanity.

But, as we know, humanity is exactly what’s on the chopping block in a Yorgos Lanthimos film. And like Dogtooth, this examination of the human family unit is conveyed like an experiment by scientists from another world: these are people, here are their biological functions, and here is how you unravel (read: fuck with) their self-imposed morals.

That The Killing of a Sacred Deer feels so distinctly alien is not unintentional. Take, for instance, Martin’s intentionally Pinocchio levels of wooden dialogue—off at first, incredibly unsettling soon after. The film, through its entirety, is captured via camera angles demanding squinting and neck-craning—if the camera is moving, it’s often above, below, or far away from its subjects. Its Under the Skin-esque thrums of unsettling instrumentals sound like transmissions from deepest space.

Perhaps an extraterrestrial reading explains the mystery behind its premise—but if we take this at face value, it’s a film of psychological detachment. At the very least, Steven and his wife Anna (Nicole Kidman) will need to be equally detached to gain closure from this ordeal.

It’s an awfully brutal comedy, and an ultimately successful one: by asking his audience to prepare for a fatal solution to a family’s foregone conclusion, Lanthimos gets away with murder. Though if you’ve studied the canon of psychological horror films the director clearly invokes in this playful nightmare, you already knew that such a thing was possible.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon