j* Movie Reviews 2019

Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

I think this is about the intense pseudo-autism of social graces?

It's a strange movie, I supposed, but not so weird or surreal as some. Positively ordinary compared with The Lobster (2016), director Yorgos' previous film. Where this feels strange is primarily through an excellent use of creeper-cam... a camera that rarely stays still but instead prowls the scene in a constant series of pans and follows, as though we, the audience are present as a sort of omnipresence... a god-like observer to this story. I do love a spin shot, and this is a never-ending series of excellent moving shots, high, low, crawling, approaching, withdrawing, colliding, sliding back then drifting sideways. Probably not the best film for anyone who gets motion-sickness. But great if you love weird visual effects without anything that strange in shot. I also feel that there was something a bit off in the grammar of the way the shots were edited, but can't quite put my finger on that... felt a bit like when you read one of those lost in translation signs or something.

Second to the never-still camera work comes the dialogue... this takes that convention of "don't tell" and turns it inside out. It has characters tell, retell and overtell basic factual and inner monologues near constantly and in complete emotionless deadpan. Explicit detailing of inner thoughts made outer. And then you kind of end up in this weird situation where you're not sure if they're shells and this all that was in them as characters, or if there is more to them. It's like the whole cast of characters has a specific form of super-social autism... their speech and social behaviour is off, disconnected, and yet their vocalisations often enact near perfection in social functioning. I took this to be about the way that social-functioning can become a kind of driving form that overtakes individualism.

Anyway, the plot, as I see it, is that a Dad is having a family affair with a son of a guy who died on his operating table. A lot of this seems to be tied up in metaphors of the heart, and heart-saving. So he's off, playing Daddy on the side. But slowly this adopted son starts to wend his way into the rest of the family, and wants the Dad as his own. When the Dad refuses, the son-on-the-side basically curses the family, saying that one of them must die to make his real father's death balance. Then like all affairs there's kind of this long and uncomfortable series of events where all the characters and the audience try to get to the bottom of how or why this affair started, and why it's important to the Dad anyway. The family starts imploding through the medically-inexplicable series of degenerative losses. This leads to a sort of final showdown with the son-on-the-side, which fails. Then the Dad kills one of his own kids to rebalance the universe and everything is A.OK. It's apparently based on some oldy-timey myth or other.

I think it was a bit ambitious, and tried hard to do something. It either didn't quite succeed, or it just didn't land right with me. It's intriguing, but not memorable - I'm already struggling to remember what happened. Shout out to Barry Keoghan, who plays the son-on-the-side - that kid has the most amazing face and this real haunting that bleeds from within. He definitely feels like a "one to watch" situation.

J* gives it 3 stars.