The Killing of a Sacred Deer

They have you terrified at what was going to come out of someones mouth in just about every scene. I dont know if I liked it or hated it. I appreciated they made Me squirm for a couple hours. But now I think I need to wash it down with like, i dont know, a disney movie lol or something. The people, every last one of them are seriously messed up in the head. Brace yourself to be pushed in the incredibly uncomfortable zone. Should have a warning, "written by some one with psycological issues"

What the hell is this crap. what a waste of time. bunch of robots? nobody has emotions?

This poorly written and badly directed movie from Oscar nominee (for "The Favourite") Yorgos Lanthimos is yet another Emperor's New Clothes example of bad contemporary cinema. You can fool some of the people some of the time...

As often is the case during a bad movie, my mind started to wander and I thought about Ed Norton's breakthrough film "Primal Fear", a suspense thriller featuring a memorable war of wills with Richard Gere. In "Deer" we have Barry Keoghan reminding me of Norton, but giving a rote, clumsy performance. For director Yorgos, niceties like believable acting, believable characters and attempts to help the viewer suspend disbelief are way too cornball for him to attempt, instead substituting his tiresome Theater of the Absurd antics.

In contemporary porn, wedded to internet streaming as the mode of delivery, a set-up for a scene/video lasts a minute or two to establish some dumb stag movie type premise, and then it's on to the races for a half hour or so of nonstop explict sex action. In "Deer" Yorgos takes an hour, fully half of the movie to shaggy-dog build up his absurd supernatural premise, during which the cast walks through their roles like zombies.

Nonsensical second half, with its absurd violence and ridiculous sexual innuendo (Nicole Kidman's off-screen hand-job for example) traps the characters with zero degrees of freedom, making their actions subject to "fate" or some pretentious appeal to Euripedes and Greek myth. It's not interesting watching them go through the motions and none of the scenes are credible. Under the guise of avant-garde filmmaking, we get hackwork. Oh, for a great filmmaker like a Sidney Lumet (with scores of great movies about conflict and war of wills, my favorite perhaps not the Pacino classics but Sean Connery in "The Offence"), not the trendy hacks of today's cinema.

This movie is really weird. If you've seen the trailer you know already most of the themes that are explored in this movie (with the sole exception of the ending). Which is pretty disappointing. That's not how you're supposed to make a trailer.

When I said that the movie is weird I meant it. The ambiance is very strange and can only be described as "autistic" (and no, this is not a joke). At the beginning of the movie all of the characters act as if they're on the autism spectrum. All the protagonists talk as if they're robots, completely devoid of anything that could be described as an emotion. As the movie progresses and as things start to escalate the protagonists finally start to act like normal human beings. It's highly likely that this was done intentionally but I found it to be a little "gimmicky".

The one thing that the movie has going for it are the totally ridiculous dialogues. I know, this is supposed to be a horror movie but some of the dialogues in the movie were so bizarre that they're more akin to comedy. Many of the funniest dialogues were even exaggerated due to the contrasting presentation of the actors. Here are some of my personal favorites: "I won't let you go until you taste my tart"... (obvious double-entendre) "My girl started menstruating last week"... (WTF?!) "Can you take off your shirt and show me?"... (said the kid to the doctor) "I will make you eat your hair!"... (spoke the father to his son) And that's not even all of it. There is this weird scene where the protagonist tells his son a "secret". Believe me when I tell you this; it's quite messed up (the story that he tells him).

There was a lot of suspense but I can't help but feel confused. I don't quite get the movie to be perfectly honest. I think it was too artsy fartsy but maybe I'm just missing something. Who knows?

Final verdict: I personally couldn't wholeheartedly recommend the movie but I do respect the execution of the director. If you're into weird movies you can give it a watch but otherwise I'd advise against it.

I'm usually a fan of independent or concept films much like this one. I love Greek mythology and what could be considered as surrealist films, they are some of my favourite in fact but whilst this film is shot beautifully and has some great music, by the end of the film, I just couldn't see more in it than as a pretentious mess which has an interesting concept but entirely wastes it in the effort to be considered as strange.

I won't go into the story because its simple and like Eraserhead, its the least interesting part of the movie. Unlike Eraserhead, however, it actually has no subtext to back up the reason for creating the movie rather than adapting Greek myths into the modern day. It's a simple revenge story with supernatural themes that is never explained but is only shown to the smallest of degrees. This tell don't show is also a big reason for why I couldn't get into the movie. It tells you about this briefly but it never goes into that story to any significant degree, not even in a way to keep it subtle.

The worst part really is that there's some very good scenes that get their very disturbing feeling but the pacing and how dramatized to the extreme some of the other scenes are, I just couldn't take the movie seriously for a big portion of the run time. It's even worse because I wanted to love this movie, maybe I should give it another try and think it over a bit more but I just keep questioning why it just didn't interest me in the characters or the story which just makes the surreal and disturbing elements feeling just feel like filler.

In short, I didn't hate it but couldn't like it or love it even as a huge lover of art-film and surrealist film in general. Maybe it just wasn't just right for me. There's scenes I like, the beginning is great but as it went along, I just got less interested with each passing minute of the film's progression. All this ending with a diner scene so pretentious that it nearly ruined the whole movie for me, it was just film-student like quality in a film that started off incredibly unique and interesting. But even though a film is unique and can be disturbing doesn't mean that its good and here it sadly wasn't the case, at least in my opinion.

This is probably going to be a controversial review but I expected so much more from this director from his other work but this just disappointed me more and more as it went along.