From Yorgos Lanthimos, director of The Lobster, which made it to the Qt3 movie top ten for 2016.
Well this movie is just all kinds of fucked up. It was somewhat of a slog but I really mostly enjoyed the journey. I didn’t however understand the last scene at the diner at all.
Edit: On second viewing this is one of my favorite movies of 2017. Its tone is so very neo-Lynchian (yeah I just made that shit up right now) combined with a kind of Kubrickian starkness. I loved it.
Just watched this. Really intense if a little detached. Reminded me a little bit of a more visually polished (but less emotionally truthful) Haneke.
Good stuff.
Looks too serious for me. Also, I’ve never heard about this movie last year.
I loved it. I think I may have enjoyed it even more than The Lobster, which has an incredible cast but didn’t quite stick the ending. If you ask me, Killing of a Sacred Deer absolutely stuck the ending. It’s nice to see that the dead-eyed kid from Dunkirk can do more than bleed out.
Also, Colin Farrell should ONLY make movies with Lanthimos. He’s so, so good as a middle-aged schlub. I hope they make a movie a year for the rest of their lives.
Watching the opening scene, when Farrell compares wrist watches with his anesthesiologist, I had a similar thought. Farrell is “in tune” with Lanthimos’s world in a way no one else quite is. Kidman was definitely not on the same wavelength. Keoghan was terrific.
Yeah, I’m not a huge Kidman fan to begin with and she didn’t seem to be following the cues of every other actor in the movie (perhaps Bill Camp aside). Lanthimos loves artificial, stilted dialogue and it works really well in his movies. Kidman was reprising her turn from Big Little Lies.
Kidman has a lot more star power than Rachel Weisz or Olivia Colman, but I think either of them would have knocked this role out of the park. Colman in particular.
It’s been a few days and I’m still thinking a lot about the movie, and particularly Farrell’s way of engaging with it. There are many ways to be stilted, but Farrell is doing something peculiar I haven’t quite put my finger on. It’s the twist that makes these movies surreal.
At first it feels like he’s robotic. Emotions don’t exist for him. But that isn’t quite it, or he’d have brushed off Martin’s approach. He wouldn’t have difficulty reasoning his way through the dilemma, like his wife did. He has emotions that drive him at a fundamental level. It bubbles over into an uncapped rage a few times during the movie.
It’s more like he’s buffered away from those emotions most of his life, but in Lanthimos’s world, that’s not remotely strange. He is how people are: near automatons hiding from these oceans of feeling that threaten to steal over them.
That’s why Weisz worked so well in The Lobster and Kidman doesn’t here. Kidman felt too natural, too attached to the children. She was a typical mother and wife, right up until she wasn’t. I like the way her character navigated the plot, I just wish Kidman felt more believable going through it.
I love how after Keoghan reveals the dilemma, you can only infer how that knowledge spreads to the other characters. Seeing how their decisions are influenced by it was devastating. The son showing off his haircut simply broke my heart.
This movie was great.
This sure is a weird thread to read if you haven’t seen the movie. Which I know you’re going to say, then just watch the movie already! But that’s kind of why I’m in the thread, to figure out if this is something I want to see. Chicken and egg, I guess.
Oh, it’s still weird after you’ve seen the movie, too. That’s just how this guy’s movies are.
One thing I couldn’t get out of my head is that the ending would have been a lot less clumsy if he had just gotten a d6.
-Tom
I kind of felt the opposite re: Farrell and the Lobster. In that movie his affect (or rather lack of it) was perfect for the narrative, whereas here (where it was much less pronounced) it felt like it was only there because it’s a Lanthimos movie. It was particularly jarring in the context of Martin, whose lack of affect is clearly part of the narrative. When they were talking, especially early in the movie, it seemed like they were both in more or less the same headspace, whereas at times in the family setting Farrell was almost normal. Maybe that was the point?
Also, to follow on from Tom, that ending was possibly the least sensible/humane way for him to resolve the situation imaginable. Again, maybe that was the point?