The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

writ. Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthymis Filippou

feat. Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Barry Keoghan, Raffey Cassidy, Sunny Suljic, Bill Camp

This offbeat sequel to The Shining tells the tale of the comeuppance of that whiny little Danny Torrance, facilitated by the mind-numbing drivel of a mouth-breathing halfwit android played by Barry Keoghan. A hospital stands in for the Overlook this time around and Colin Farrell in the Jack Nicholson role, now a surgeon who is so shell shocked (and possibly under attack from a beard-shaped parasite) from frame one that he largely speaks in platitudes and avoids showing any warmth. Don’t worry, whenever it gets especially slow-paced or you expect hear some obvious bit of important exposition that familiar heavy score blares up to cover any coherence from coming down the pike.

Nicole Kidman appears as though she doesn’t know which movie she’s in, trying to please hubby and kids until shit gets weird enough long enough that she rightfully demands that hubby lift a finger to do something about their situation. You know that irritating trait of many a horror or thriller film where the viewer enters a normal world and spends time with the characters seeing their lives before the crazy shit starts happening. Don’t worry, none of that here. We jump right in cranked high with unlovable people and terse interactions that would make that other viewer wonder what the hell is going on with these weirdos and expect some big reveal of a significant bit of backstory that explains why they all act like aliens from the very beginning. Sure, there’s a secret and it comes out eventually, but it’s not the kind that explains away a phony family dynamic or the stilted dialogue between all parties.

Killing comes off as needy, a showcase of exaggerated tensions and desperately aggressive dramatic machinations. It comes very late to the one big question at hand and stumbles through an implausible b-story romance that flaunts the unreality further. And even in the late game, petty idiotic tiny choices, like the parents searching in all the wrong places for their daughter when everyone knows exactly where she is, are asserted as though to insist upon a kind of formalism, but instead annoy viewer and take one out of the story. It’s as though the filmmaker anxiously set out to turn Hitchcock’s idea of taking an unlikely premise and playing it out as believably as possible and turned it on its head, taking an unbelievable premise and playing it out as unbelievably as possible.