Recensioni de* critic*

There's neither pleasure nor edification in seeing Farrell's scummy pater squirm while his (of course outwardly stable, secretly fragile, wholly corruptible) suburban household suffers at the whims of a vengeful millennial troll (Barry Keoghan, admittedly pretty creepy). The film's jerry-rigged, Twilight Zone scenario isn't suggestive or disturbing; it's silly, made even more so by the Steadicam solemnity of the presentation.

As in the director's breakthrough, Dogtooth, and his English-language debut, The Lobster, the real subject is the twisted logic of relationships, obligations, and social façades, caricatured through the director's distinctive blend of grotesquerie, surreal deadpan, and alienness. The inspiration comes from Greek mythology, with Farrell as a suburban King Agamemnon, but the style is almost Kubrickian and rivetingly strange, cracking into nightmare in the climactic scene.

The supernatural element short-circuits Lanthimos's pretensions of tragedy, and after its electrifying first hour, Killing loses it spark and narrows to a series of gruesome scenes. It's less a film about crime and punishment than an occasion for Lanthimos to cycle through the idiosyncratic set of perversities that first grabbed our attention but has been growing staler with each picture.

Of course, such cold-blooded grand guignol sits directly in the lineage of Greek tragedy, and Lanthimos has simply made a film that lays bare the narrative and emotional extremity traditionally repressed by the formal restraint of classicism.

The truth is that it's rarely daddy-men with god complexes that are punished, but their charges and subordinates... The film's portrayal of the self-interested surgeon should ring bells for anyone who's read the news this last year. The Killing of a Sacred Deer begins, like Funny Games, with a blast of opera: unlike Funny Games, it also opens on a close-up of a chest cavity mid-surgery, a naked heart. There is a human – if not humane – truth about the malice of inaction beating at its core.

Lanthimos has long been intrigued by the comedic power of the uncanny and its close relationship with dread. He keeps both sensations in constant flux here, ably assisted by his regular cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis, whose camera flits and prowls around the cast like they’re under surveillance, before closing in for ravishing, ravenous close-ups.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is humane and satirical, horrifying and hilarious, at once a work of realism and fantasy—Lanthimos, yet again, has found a surreal balance between extremes that perhaps no other director could hope to imitate.

The film is not as bizarre as Lanthimos’ previous films, which some may bemoan, but others, like me, may find this approach less conspicuous and more engaging.

Whether puckish, wry, dry, coy, or cold, these images offer, above all, the conspicuous restraint of aesthetic nonintervention, of falsely bland repudiation of visual expression, as if to let the facts onscreen speak for themselves. But the actual artistic point of these satires on bourgeois comfort and sophistication is a visual simplicity that matches the dramas' repudiations of technological, intellectual, and bureaucratic modernity.

In Lanthimos’s universe, love is a construction that falls down in the face of other human drives, whether it’s the drive to save face, to escape discomfort, to prevail against an enemy, or just to survive. The Killing of a Sacred Deer mixes all of those together in service of a myth-tinged nightmare.

With The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Lanthimos edges into Hitchcock-Polanski territory. It has the makings of a psychological thriller except, of course, for genuine psychology and thrills... Lanthimos repeats and/or exaggerates flimsy, sometimes outré behavior in an attempt to fashion some intricate audiovisual architecture. But this movie is built on landfill and sand. When The Killing of a Sacred Deer descends to scenes of torture, the movie (and most audiences) can't survive the shock.

As is always the case with the Greek filmmkaer, there are no easy answers... Even the opaque hints can drive you cuckoo with frustration. Lanthimos does not coddle his audience. His M.O. is to shock, provoke and leave you talking to the voices inside your own head.