Visceral, Ugly Beauty

Everyone I know who likes modern foreign arthouse films likes Yorgos Lanthimos. I'm embarrassed to say that I do not. It's like it negates my taste. I wanted to like Dogtooth (2009, Yorgos Lanthimos) and The Lobster (2015, Lanthimos), but they did little for me. I feel the same shame for not being crazy about, say Michael Haneke. In my defense though, why don't more of these people's conversations praise Bruno Dumont, huh? That's what I'd like to know.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017, Lanthimos) is a conceptual narrative involving a 16 year old named MARTIN (Barry Keoghan) who morally scrutinizes a surgeon (Colin Farrell) about ethics. Martin makes the movie unbearable. He's like an arthouse JIGSAW from the Saw franchise. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is nowhere near as frustrating and impossible as Knock Knock (2015, Eli Roth), but I was reminded of the use of a stifling claustrophobia brought on by the inescapable suffering enacted by a young, lower-class psychopath torturing an affluent career-man. And the spaghetti scene triggers a coded link to Gummo (1997, Harmony Korine) that disgustingly portrays white trash as people who completely lack table manners.

The film plays out like The Shining (1980, Stanley Kubrick) formally due to wide-angle Steadicam tracking shots following or leading characters through long corridors, slow zooms, and an off putting continual use of cacophonous Ligeti. The dialogue is always delivered monotonously and feels distractingly stylized, unlike Rainer Werner Fassbinder's films, where the same technique achieves an enjoyably Brechtian detachment.

However, I did find the mystery in The Killing of a Sacred Deer intriguing and in no way gratuitous.