The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017)

Lanthimos returns to the twisted family scenario of Dogtooth, except this time the twisted element comes from outside and the tone is turned up to full horror. It's a loose retelling of the Greek tragedy Iphigenia at Aulis, and certainly Lanthimos is well-qualified to do justice to the form, with its endless expository monologues and overblown themes. He's proven himself to be an autist of the first order, with the cypher-like actors given the brief to deliver their lines as robotically as possible, and a vicarious desire to upset bourgeois sensibilities, with random violence and sexual deviancy as his principal tools. In that aspect, the director is a sort of blood brother of far too many Austrians in particular, such as Ulrich Seidl.
Colin Farrell takes the lead role again, as a cardiac surgeon who for some initially unexplained reason welcomes an odd teenage boy into his family home. It's clear as he begins effectively stalking Farrell and his daughter that he's a sociopath, but with the rest of the cast virtually as mechanical as he is, the end result is utter dramatic flatness, which recedes far too late: only once the tragedy is almost complete and Farrell and Nicole Kidman as his wife finally get to show some emotion. Of course it's very strong in visual style and blasts of unsettling music, and has once again earned the director some rave reviews for the combination of these with the shock quotient. But whoever is impressed by this is basically as far up their own fundament as Lanthimos is.

4/10