Yorgos Lanthimos’ films are unlike anything else you can see at a movie theater, singular experiences that you might love or might hate, but you’ll definitely have a strong reaction. Lanthimos’ latest film Bugonia, starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, is another entry in a very complex body of work, a hostage thriller that’s also a dark comedy about conspiracy theories and, perhaps, a sci-fi twist.
But Bugonia is far from the only Lanthimos film that plays with this kind of cross-genre speculative territory. If you’re a horror fan, and you connected with Bugonia, you can follow up the experience by watching one of Lanthimos’ most chilling films, a deeply unsettling combination of psychological thriller and all-out supernatural terror.
Released in 2017, The Killing of a Sacred Deer boasts an all-star cast that includes Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, and Barry Keoghan in one of two breakout roles (the other was in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk) that year. Like Bugonia, it’s an intimate character study with some very high stakes, and like all of Lanthimos’ films, it pushes things into the realm of the absurd with confidence and often nerve-shredding power.
Farrell is Steven, a heart surgeon who, out of a sense of guilt over losing the boy’s father on the operating table, has started surreptitiously hanging out with Martin (Keoghan). When Martin wants to get closer to Steven’s family, Steven is receptive at first, but things turn dark very quickly. Eventually, Martin reveals that he’s concocted a very specific, even magical form of revenge for his father’s death, and that if Steven wants it to stop, he will have to kill a member of his own family.
Though there are certain clear rules for how this works, some of them laid out by Martin himself, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is not a film in the business of laying out too much lore. It doesn’t want you to be tethered to easily understandable circumstances. Instead, it’s a dark, thrilling meditation on what it means to hold another person’s life in your hands, how that changes with each new circumstance, and how far you’d go to get that feeling to go away.
Steven and Martin are, in their own ways, each familiar with this phenomenon, and the film is all about twisting the way each character deals with human life over the course of the story. It’s smart, it’s taut, and it’s capped off by great performances, particularly from Keoghan, who proves he was always an actor to watch.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer is now streaming on HBO Max.
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