#film critic 1 : KILLING OF THE SACRED DEER
KILLING OF THE SACRED DEER, YORGOS LANTHIMOS ‘LAST FILM, STILL INTO THEATRES. PLEBISCITED IN CANNES, WHERE IT OBTAINED THE SCENARIO AWARD “PALME”, THE FILM OPERATES AS A LANCING DIVING IN THE MEDICAL UNIVERSE RELATED TO THE DESTINY OF THE MURPHY FAMILY.
After an operation, Steven, the surgeon operator, and his anesthesiologist, have an insignificant chat about the watch bands, necessary return to the banality of things after hours spent in short breath, hoping to preserve life.
Then Steven goes to one of his regular rendez-vous with Martin. This boy is the son of one of his former patients who died during an operation, under rather shady circumstances. The teenager, 16, quickly appears to be very sure of himself. For six months, he got closer and closer to the surgeon, until he became too close to him.
He managed to integrate into his family, after Steven offered to introduce him. The Murphy’s present a perfect picture: Kim tries the choral singing, Bob dreams about his future piano, Anna, tidy and acquiescent mother, portraited by Nicole Kidman, maintains bottomless conversations. The bourgeois and well-off family quickly appreciates Martin.
Every appearance of Martin, played by Barry Keoghan, causes discomfort. The young man has an inquisitive, insistent and toxic glance, and above all, he is everywhere. He calls Steven regularly, waiting for him at the hospital. The embarrassment is total when he forces him to dine with him and his mother, who launches herself in a bad seduction number. Later, Martin insists upon the surgeon, making a case for his mother’s beauty.
Half-expressing, Martin reveals his dangerous prophecy: since his father died because of Steven Murphy’s responsibility, the latter will have to sacrifice one of the members of his family. If he does not manage to decide which one, each of the four members will slowly come to the death, in a detailed plan in four phases. Such that will be Martin’s revenge. What we had — by half thoughts — already suspected, is exposed in a brutal way. From there, Martin puts his machiavellian plan into execution, if at least there is one, because this plan seems nonexistent. If everything goes as planned: Bob, then Kim become one after another paralyzed from legs, nothing explains, gentle psychological torture, the power that Martin actually has on the realization of this prophecy. Kim tells she is ready to die, such Iphigenia, as furthermore the film is inspired by this Greek mythology, to sacrifice for his family. Steven is adorned with an almost perverse psychological madness which goes crescendo till sequester Martin, tirelessly and more and more present until…
The aesthetics is very developed. The spaces are sublimated, playing with the immaculate hospital’s tragic atmosphere, the neat decoration of the bourgeoise house, alternating wide and tight shots to strengthen weightlessness. Classical or symphonic music makes scenes dramatic, giving its a tragic aspect, although what it is given to watch is sometimes banal: a walk in a corridor of the clinic, a fall, a look. This realization generates an uncomfortable beauty : an operated heart, bloody gloves, medical rooms are such as paintings witha sacred aspect. The repertoire is Christic, mythological. But Yorgos Lanthimos, on one other hand, did not exploit all the tracks sketched in his scenario. Steven, the father omnibulated by medicine, loses his temper when a problem does not seem to have a rational solution. He seeks absolutely to find pragmatic solutions, he summoned renowned experts to pronounce about his children’s paralysis’s cases, which he assimilates to some neurological failures, without any examination revealing anything. Anna, a brilliant ophthalmologist, a tidy woman with a cold benevolence, begins an investigation about her husband, submitting for that to the fantasies of those who have information. Kim is eager to live her first teenage emotions. Bob is a passive boy, endearing but a little bland. Martin is overbearing, intrusive, secretly avenging, surely very clever. These singular profiles draw a gallery of characters which could have been much more explored. Especially as the theme of vengeance is conducive to develop the psychology in the darkest darkness or why not — the brightest lights. Unfortunately, Yorgos Lanthimos brushes rather than dig the question of the psychological. The film, if it involves lot of embarrassing situations, misses the genre of psychological thriller, which would have given him, associated with aesthetics, its full extent.
