Yorgos Lanthimos (2017)
In Aulis, as the Greeks prepared for war against Troy, Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, accidentally killed a deer in a grove sacred to the goddess Artemis. Her resulting displeasure stilled the winds and the becalmed Greek fleet could not set sail. Agamemnon learned that he had to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia in order to appease Artemis. This Greek myth is the basis of Euripides’ play Iphigenia at Aulis; there have been many more recent adaptations of the story in the form of theatre, opera and cinema. It now supplies the title and the essential storyline for Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film, set in present-day America. Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell) is a cardiothoracic surgeon. Three years after one of his patients died on the operating table, Steven’s two teenage children, Kim (Raffey Cassidy) and Bob (Sunny Suljic), fall ill, losing the use of their legs. The affliction coincides with the presence in the Murphy household of Martin (Barry Keoghan), the son of the patient who died in Steven’s care. Having insinuated himself with the Murphys, Martin advises Steven that a member of the surgeon’s close family – either his daughter or his son or his wife Anna (Nicole Kidman) – must be sacrificed in atonement for Martin’s father’s death.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer is something of a new departure for Yorgos Lanthimos, and not just because he and Efthymis Filippou, his regular writing partner, draw on their country’s classical mythology and literature. All of Lanthimos’s three previous features centred on an aberrant set-up, the scale of which expanded with each film: a family home in Dogtooth (2009); an uncommon public service in Alps (2011); a dystopic society in The Lobster (2015). What occurred in these structures was, from the film audience’s point of view, bizarre but believable according to the extraordinary conventions of the set-up. In contrast, The Killing of the Sacred Deer includes inexplicable, perhaps supernatural events, yet its setting is the real world. It doesn’t look much like the real world, however, even if it’s a world not unfamiliar on screen. The clinical vastness of the hospital where Steven works is almost matched by the spacious soullessness of the Murphys’ home. The camera’s movement as it observes these locations is magisterial – an Olympian overhead shot of hospital escalators, at the bottom of which Bob collapses when his legs stop functioning, is particularly memorable. Although the DoP is Thimios Bakatakis, who also shot Dogtooth and The Lobster, I don’t remember the visuals in either of those drawing attention to themselves as they do here. They ensure – in combination with Lanthimos’s choice of accompanying music, most of it either austere or dissonant – that The Killing (unlike the more insidiously disturbing The Lobster) is ominous from an early stage.
The film’s style is so firmly in the foreground that it tends to suffocate the story, in spite of the extraordinary happenings. These are startling only when a scene has broken free of the prevailing atmosphere – for example, when Kim collapses midway through her school choir’s uplifting Christmas song (‘Carol of the Bells’, written for the film and sung by the Lachey Arts Choir). The effect is reinforced by the way that Raffey Cassidy plays Kim, switching between blankness and animation; singing in the choir, Kim is vividly transformed until she keels over. Lanthimos’s calculated direction also tends to muffle his confounding humour, though here too there are exceptions. The opening sequence – an engrossing close-up of open-heart surgery (accompanied by the Schubert Stabat Mater) – is succeeded by a bathetic post-theatre conversation between Steven and his anaesthesiologist (Bill Camp) about high-end watchstraps. Martin’s purposeful curiosity about, and demand to see, Steven’s armpit hair is semi-autistic and semi-surreal, an unaccountably funny combination. I was less sure that the comedy of the climactic scene, in which Steven prepares to kill Anna, Kim or Bob, was intentional. Each of the three potential victims sits on a different chair in the enormous living room; Steven pulls a beanie hat down over his eyes then spins himself round before firing a rifle shot. He fails twice before eventually succeeding. The sequence made me want to laugh but only because Steven, who seems generally a bit hopeless, looked silly.
To help inform his dreadful decision, Steven asks his children’s teacher for an assessment of their relative merits. Delivering his unusual end-of-term report, the teacher speaks admiringly of an essay that Kim wrote about Iphigenia. This is both a red herring (Bob gets the fatal bullet) and a rather forceful nudge from Yorgos Lanthimos, in case the viewer hasn’t got the Greek tragedy foundation of The Killing of a Sacred Deer. The main disappointment of the film is how little Lanthimos bothers to translate that foundation into resonant present-day terms. He might, for example, have played with ideas around the godlike qualities of the modern medical expert – not just the your-life-in-their-hands aspect of hospital treatment but also the surgeon’s ultimate indifference to a death in the theatre, which for him may be a professional reverse but not the personal calamity that it is for the patient and their loved ones. Lanthimos seems, rather, to make use of the conventions of tragedy only in order to degrade them through melodramatic cliché. It’s traditional for the tragic protagonist to have a fatal flaw: Steven’s alcohol habit led to a couple of drinks just before he performed the operation that killed Martin’s father.
Martin doesn’t arrive suddenly in Steven’s life as an unexpected avenger: they have an established social relationship from the start of the film, even though it’s largely unexplained and Steven’s family don’t at first know about it. Until he pronounces his curse on the family, Martin shows signs of wanting Steven to replace his father. After Martin has come to the Murphys’ home for the first time, he reciprocates only to the extent of asking Steven to dinner at his home. Martin seems keen to pair off his mother (Alicia Silverstone) with Steven, leaving them to watch Groundhog Day together on television. The story has a curious, sexually charged father-son motif. At one point, Steven reveals to Bob that, as a teenager, he (Steven) worried about how little semen he could produce and masturbated his sleeping father for purposes of comparison. This anecdote echoes Martin’s above-mentioned interest in Steven’s body hair, sparked by information from Bob that it is three times more abundant than Martin’s own.
The cast’s deliberately low-key readings, another element of the film’s conspicuous style, are not fully orchestrated. Thanks to her much superior technique, Nicole Kidman makes the lack of emotionality sound natural and uses it to intriguing effect – her Anna is both chilly and poignant. In comparison, Colin Farrell and the two young actors playing Kim and Bob sound as if they’re putting on deadpan voices. Even so (and even though he doesn’t project enough intelligence), this is one of Farrell’s better efforts. His partnership with Kidman works much better here than in The Beguiled. Barry Keoghan, who played the ill-fated George in Dunkirk, is a revelation as the sneaky, mysteriously brutal Martin.
3 November 2017
