The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos)

[Henry Gale]

IMDb / Wiki

[Winston*]

This movie fucked me up.

[Ivan Drago]

I need this so bad, it hurts.

Also, that poster is haunting.

[Idioteque Stalker]

I was shocked to find this didn't work at all for me. Stylistically, I still like Lanthimos' bold choices. The sound design, framing, slo-mo, and bits of morbid humor were often a delight. [

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("Dad! Bob is dying!" had me bust out in laughter I'm sure others found inappropriate.)

] But the clinical, monotone acting--which worked to fantastic effect in Dogtooth and The Lobster--fell flat in a major way in this more somber, pseudo-horror narrative. Furthermore, his movies are conceit-driven to a rare degree, and therefore live and die by your willingness to accept that conceit. I didn't buy in, so the whole thing just felt very false, with little tangible peril.

[Spinal]

Slight disappointment. It has many excellent qualities, particularly Kidman's performance, the Kubrickian cinematography and a highly unsettling score. But after ratcheting up the tension, the ending left me cold. It's a step down from Dogtooth and The Lobster for me. Whereas those films felt utterly unique in their vision, this one feels a bit more pedestrian in concept. Maybe I'll eventually come across a metaphorical reading that blows my mind, but for right now, I don't know that this took me anywhere that was particularly enlightening.

[Ivan Drago]

Fuuuuuuuck this was frustrating. It does a good job of putting the audience inside the head of a parent going insane with uncertainty as his children go through a horrible disease, but it does so at the expense of its own logic. And while the last five minutes are certainly twisted, I was more shocked through the entirety of Dogtooth than I was with this. It looks good, sounds good and the deadpan performances are good, but that's about it.

[Mal]

I cannot with this movie. [

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I wanted to fucking murder Martin with my own bare hands

]

that being said, it's SO insanely effective. Oh my goodness. I seriously want to see this again asap.

[Ezee E]

Holy cow. This is some truly Old Testament brutal storytelling here. I'm astonished, and SO SO glad I didn't see any preview or even read the logline. I just let it play itself out.

[TGM]

[

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Idiot chewing gum in the theater and sitting beside me, during the scene when Colin Farrel is about to shoot one of his family members: "... Wait, why is he going to kill one of them?!"
Her friend: "... What?! Have you seriously not been paying any attention? ... *sigh*, I'll explain it to you after the movie's over."

]

I liked this better than The Lobster, btw.

[Ezee E]

lol. I was sitting second row (only 30 or so seats) at an Alamo and could hear a lot of muttering from the old people in the rows behind me. I was far away enough where it didn't annoy me too much.

[baby doll]

A masterful film to be sure but not a particular novel one, marrying Haneke-esque subject matter (the sins of the father visited upon the children) to a Kubrick-esque style (slow zooms, wide angle lenses, modernist music--the kid even looks like Danny from The Shining). It held my attention throughout but it's easily the least of the three Lanthimos films I've seen so far (never caught up with Alps).

[Pop Trash]

I'm kinda with Spinal about this one in the sense that I think the movie is very well made (albeit cribbing a lot from Kubrick) and the deadpan performances worked for me (esp. Barry Keoghan who comes across more awkward and spergy than evil), but I was grasping at straws as to deeper meanings here. That said, I do think this works on a Old Testament / Ancient Greek morality play level. Keoghan's character could almost be swapped out with a Greek God of Damnation and the story wouldn't fundamentally change. I've often wondered how much Lanthimos is influenced by the Ancient Greeks in his storytelling. This is the second of his films with violence to the eyes, an apparent allusion to Oedipus Rex.

[Pop Trash]

Here we go:

http://www.vulture.com/2017/10/the-k...eek-myths.html

[Stay Puft]

Yeah, I'm with Spinal/Peng/etc. I found it wholly predictable, right down to the ending, which just whiffed as a result. It left me with a... "okay, and?" sort of feeling. I shrugged and moved on. The only shocking/surprising part of the whole movie was Alicia Silverstone getting a cameo out of nowhere, and then getting one of the best lines as a result. I loved that scene. And I did enjoy the film for the most part. It gets wickedly funny the closer it gets to its fated outcome, to the point that I was screaming with laughter during a couple scenes ("I'm going to water the plants now" maybe being the biggest laugh I've had in a movie theatre all year).

I kinda want to vote nay, because I expect more from Yorgos, but I did still enjoy the film, so I dunno. I'm on the fence, I guess.
I'd probably put this above Alps but way below The Lobster and Dogtooth.

[Peng]

Maybe Barry Keoghan gives the best performance (although Nicole Kidman is great too, wavering expertly between Lanthimos-land and real emotions) because his character is a stand-in for the director? One big engrossing troll of a film, but I didn't get much out of it in the end. It's his first film I saw (didn't see Alps) in which its premise isn't inherently rife with absurdist humor, being more of a horror scenario, and I feel it loses a lot in the process. Still some deliciously, dryly batshit bits though; like Idioteque Stalker, I still can't get over [

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"Dad, Bob is dying!"

] 6/10

[Rico]

"I won't let you leave until you have tried my tart."

[Dukefrukem]

So the Lobster was one of my favorite movies of last year. How does this hold up against it?

[Henry Gale]

So the Lobster was one of my favorite movies of last year. How does this hold up against it?

I like it even more. It's even more gorgeously dour, gleefully nihilistic, and obtusely comedic, overall just designed in a way that I can't see being as widely appreciated. But then again people I know who I never thought would even watch The Lobster saw it and loved it, so maybe I can't predict people's reactions to Lanthimos.

Dogtooth is still my favourite of his, though.

EDIT: What the hell? I made this thread and never shared thoughts on it? I guess TIFF time does that to me..

[Irish]

I liked this as far as it went. Everything in the production was strong, but it's so excessively mannered and overlong for a movie with a pulp premise. (I've seen this idea played out often, and recently, because horror anthology stuff is more popular these days. Cf: "XX," also from last year.)

I would have liked it more if it had more to say beyond some obvious class commentary, or if the director had tried to subvert his own conceits. Instead, it plays the story out slowly to the bitter end and the final minutes are pretty much exactly what everybody in the audience thought they would be.

One thing I like about Lanthimos is that his style is odd and distinct that I spend an inordinate amount of time considering what he's trying to achieve. It's also what I dislike about him. His attention to detail seems fetishistic, so I'm thinking about what his weird framing or long lenses might mean instead of thinking about his characters or his drama.

After seeing 3 of his movies, I feel like I could skip the rest of his career and still feel like I'm up to date.