The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Plot:

When Steven (Colin Farrell), a surgeon, takes a young teenage boy named Martin (Barry Keoghan) under his wing his life quickly begins to fall apart. 

Pros:

•I’ll give director Yorgos Lanthimos credit, his movies certainly are unique. He also directed The Lobster, a movie I didn’t particularly care for even though I thought it was well made and well acted. I just didn’t like the tone. Anyway, I have to say for the most part I liked this one much better. I’m a big fan of psychological thrillers and movies that bring up big moral dilemmas. 

•Like The Lobster, all of the characters speak in very monotone voices throughout the whole movie. There were maybe two or three moments where anyone showed any real emotion and even then it was VERY brief. And the random things they would talk about. Very odd and at times inappropriate. Definitely got some awkward laughs. A lot of people are going to hate this about the movie but it didn’t bother me. 

•Intriguing story (which was also written by the director I believe) that kept my attention the whole time. 

•I’ve liked most things I’ve seen Colin Farrell in and I thought he and Nicole Kidman were great in this. 

•The real performance that is sticking out to me is Barry Keoghan. Last thing I saw him in was Dunkirk and that role couldn’t have been more different that what he does here. In this movie he plays a very disturbed young man. They never tell you specifically but if I were to guess his character has some form of Aspergers. He really nails this down to the tiniest detail. Very believable. 

•The muted color tones (make no mistake though, it’s not totally devoid of colors. This isn’t a Zack Snyder film.) fit perfectly with the tone they were going for. 

•Kudos to the make up department for their amazing work. This isn’t really a spoiler because they talk about it in the trailer but there’s a scene where a character’s eyes are bleeding. It looked so real that you could swear they must’ve really done something to their eyes. 

Cons:

•Extremely slow paced and while for the most part I was fine with it, there were times towards the end where it had me saying, “Okay that’s enough. Let’s start wrapping this up.”

•The overpowering score. It didn’t happen too often but in some scenes they would play this very loud combination of violin, piano, and what sounded like a moving train. It would drown out the dialogue and I couldn’t understand what characters were saying. 

My Rating: 8/10