Deadpan humour meets full-blooded horror in Yorgos Lanthimos’s unsettling drama about a surgeon’s friendship with a teenage boy “That critical moment we both knew would come someday – here it is…” After the jet-black social satire of _Dogtooth_, the role-playing bereavement of _Alps_ and the quasi-sci-fi tragicomedy of _The Lobster_, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos sets his sights on something altogether more unsettling. Segueing seamlessly from the theatre of absurdity to cruelty, he presents a tale of mythical, methodical revenge that starts with an ironic chuckle and moves inexorably towards a silent scream. Taking its titular theme from the myth of Iphigenia, _The Killing of a Sacred Deer_ is a wrathful tale of retribution and responsibility transposed from the stages of ancient Greece to the screens of 21st-century cinema. On one level it’s a typically arch dramatic conundrum, laced with Lanthimos’s trademark off-kilter artifice and deadpan humour. On another, it’s a _Saw_ movie for the arthouse crowd, an increasingly sickening hunger game driven by an inflexible moral imperative, with a whiff of medical misadventure. Continue reading...
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