The Scare Salon

Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is quite a celebrated director, having been nominated for six Oscars as well as winning a BAFTA and a Golden Globe. His style is very idiosyncratic and provocative, to say the least, but is so singular that I’m pretty sure you could never mistake one of his films for anyone else’s, even though the subject matter of each one is pretty different.

The only film of his I had seen prior to this review was his excellent 2018 black comedy period piece The Favourite (which I absolutely loved); I actually thought I had seen Dogtooth (2009) as well, but when I read the synopsis, it didn’t sound all that familiar, so I must have confused it with something else (maybe Lars von Trier’s Dogville from 2003, now that I’m thinking about it). Alternately, I may have started watching Dogtooth and then got distracted by something else; that happens a lot.

But I had been seeing the 2017 film The Killing of a Sacred Deer popping up on lots of “disturbing movies” lists, which is like an open invitation for me to watch it, so I finally got around to doing just that. As of this writing, it’s available free on Tubi.

I don’t know if I would call Sacred Deer a horror movie exactly, though it does have horrific aspects to it, and for sure treads into psychological horror territory. It’s an unsettling movie by any measure, and a lot of the dread it evokes stems from the odd, off-kilter, almost robotic actions and dialogue of its characters. It’s set in reality, but also has a veneer of unreality to it, as though it’s occurring in a dimension just slightly different from our own.

As with many movies I talk about, I would strongly suggest going into Sacred Deer with as little foreknowledge of the plot as possible, because the film is much more effective when you have no idea what’s going on or what might happen next. This movie made me VERY anxious at several points, and the whole thing was just saturated with a sick, uncomfortable feeling, partly caused by the bizarre reactions and speech of the characters, but also due to the strange background score and musical cues, which kept me on edge throughout the entire runtime. I’m not going to spoil the whole movie, but I will be revealing some plot points that you may not want to know before going in, so please be advised.

You know you’re in for it from the very first few minutes of the film; classical music plays over a completely black screen for a distressingly long time, so long that you just know Lanthimos is going to throw some intensely fucked up imagery in your face after lulling you into complacency. And indeed, that is exactly what occurs: a tight close-up of open heart surgery suddenly assaults your eyeballs, and again, stays on the screen for an excruciating length of time; you’re just watching this heart squishily beating in this open thoracic cavity while the surgeons’ scalpels and tiny sponges fritter in from around the edges.

We then get into the story proper and are introduced to one of our main characters, a cardiothoracic surgeon by the name of Dr. Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell). After the surgery is over, he walks down the hall having a conversation with his colleague Dr. Larry Banks (Barry Bernson) about watches, of all things, and if you see this first scene and are put off by the stilted, emotionless tone of their discussion, then you might want to hop off this train now because that method of communication is going to be the order of the day going forward. You have been duly warned.

Later that same afternoon, Steven has a seemingly clandestine meeting with a sixteen-year-old kid named Martin Lang (Barry Keoghan), who he talks to at a diner and then drives out to the waterfront. He gives the kid an expensive watch much like the one he referred to earlier when he was talking to his colleague. Martin seems weird and off-putting, and the viewer is a little uneasy because it’s not entirely clear what the relationship between Steven and this teenage boy is. Is this kid his estranged son, or a son from another family that his current family doesn’t know about? Or is it something more sinister? There doesn’t appear to be any sexual component to their interaction, but the fact that you’re pretty sure Steven is hiding this from his family does make you wonder.

That evening, Steven is at home having dinner with said family, which consists of his wife Anna (Nicole Kidman), his teenage daughter Kim (Raffey Cassidy), and his younger teenage son Bob (Sunny Suljic). The conversations here are just as creepy and disquieting as all the ones that have happened so far, with Anna talking about all the family having “lovely hair,” and various other strange things. Shit gets even more peculiar when Steven and Anna retire to bed, and we discover that they apparently enjoy a game called “general anesthetic,” where Anna just lies there pretending to be unconscious while Steven fucks her. So there’s that.

As an aside, there’s also a later scene where Steven is speaking at some kind of big fancy dinner convention, and after his speech, he tells his work colleague Dr. Banks that his daughter got her first period in the same way that he’d proudly announce that she’d made the honor roll. So you get the gist.

Meanwhile, Steven thinks it’s time to invite Martin over to meet his family. It’s right about this stage that we find out how Steven and Martin know each other: some unspecified time before, Steven performed surgery on Martin’s dad, but the guy died on the operating table. Steven felt bad for the kid (for reasons that will become somewhat clearer later on) and decided to become something of a father figure.

Martin comes over to spend the day with the Murphys, and he seems charming enough, if somewhat awkward. He hangs out with Kim and Bob, and they also have some bizarre conversations about underarm hair and such. It also seems obvious that Kim is developing a bit of a crush on the creepy kid.

Steven offers to let Martin stay overnight, but he declines, saying he doesn’t like leaving his mother alone. He also tells the Murphys that he and his mother live in a “not-so-nice house in a not-so-nice neighborhood,” and you can sense the resentment underneath the kid’s polite demeanor. Uh oh.

From this point, Martin seems to become ever more stalkery, showing up at Steven’s workplace, taking Kim for rides on a motorcycle, and attempting to insinuate his way further into Steven’s life. He invites Steven to dinner with him and his mother at their home in a way that Steven can’t really refuse, and once he’s there, Martin guilts him into staying to watch his favorite movie (which is Groundhog Day). In the middle of the movie, Martin goes to bed, leaving Steven alone with his mother (Alicia Silverstone), who begins to put the moves on him. Steven extricates himself from the situation and gets the hell out of there, but Martin seems bound and determined to hook up his mother with Steven, even though Steven reasonably points out that he already has a wife he loves very much.

Not long after Steven turns down the offer, something very odd occurs. Steven’s son Bob wakes up for school one morning and says that he can’t move his legs. The Murphys take him to the hospital where they run all kinds of tests, but they can’t find anything wrong. Steven is convinced the kid is faking, but Bob doesn’t seem to be getting any better. There’s one completely off-the-wall scene where Steven is attempting to get Bob to admit that he’s faking his illness by saying that he (Steven) is going to tell Bob a secret that he never told anyone: that as a boy, he jacked off his own father while his father was passed out drunk because he was curious why his own jacking off didn’t produce much fluid. So yeah.

Anyway, the upshot of the matter is that Martin has caused Bob’s mystery illness somehow (it’s implied that it’s some kind of supernatural curse), and gives Steven a choice: he can either kill one member of his own family to make up for “killing” Martin’s father, or he can watch each member of his family die one by one from the same lingering, multi-stage illness (which eventually comprises lack of appetite, bleeding from the eyes, and death).

If this premise sounds out there, keep in mind that it is loosely based on the Greek myth of Iphigenia (which is mentioned in the film as the topic of an excellent essay Kim wrote in school). In the story, Agamemnon kills a sacred deer (hence the movie’s title) in a grove belonging to the goddess Artemis, who then insists that Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to make up for the slaying of the animal.

The remainder of The Killing of a Sacred Deer is Steven trying desperately to get out of this predicament, and the family members jockeying for position, trying to not be the one chosen for sacrifice. It almost sounds funny, and it kind of is, but in a very black, low-key, horrifying kind of way; there’s even one scene where Steven is speaking to the principal of his kids’ school, asking which kid is better, in an attempt to help him make a decision about which one to kill. It’s humorous, but also very, very fucked up.

This is definitely not a movie for everyone, and if you can’t hang with the overtly affected dialogue and deliberately off-kilter nature of the thing, I would recommend giving it a pass because it’s very mannered in a way that might annoy the shit out of some people. But I have to say that those very aspects of the film were some of what made it so compelling to me; as the story unfolded, I was getting more and more apprehensive, to the point where I felt like I was watching a car crash happening in slow motion that I was powerless to look away from. I also have to especially single out the performance of Barry Keoghan as Martin; he did such a great job making his dorky, awkward character seem intensely menacing, which went a long way toward causing all of the underlying tension throughout the story. It’s not a traditional horror film at all, but I will say it’s one of the most unsettling movies I’ve ever watched, so make of that what you will.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.