Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, who gained fame with 2009's disturbingly original Doogtooth (and last year's The Lobster), makes movies that an average person will either love or hate - I seriously doubt there's middle ground in his approach. In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Colin Farrell's Cardiothoracic surgeon Steven Murphy resembles a pre-one armed man tussle Richard Kimble, his long, gray-ish beard giving him a medical version of a Grizzly Adams look. Living in perfectly clean and safe suburbia with his wife (Nicole Kidman) and his two children, Dr. Murphy's existence is thrown into a loop when his friendship with teenager Martin (Barry Keoghan) takes an unexpected turn after his children get seriously sick. Is the boy responsible for their affliction as a revenge for something Murphy had inadvertently done in the past?
Lanthimos here creates a world that is interesting to look at (the production design is striking), but simultaneously fills every scene with elongated moments that drag a storyline that should've maxed out at ninety minutes past the two-hour mark because, well... he can (do we really need to hear several different conversations about why adults have more underarm hair than teenagers?). We're also never quite clear how a despicable boy such as Martin could ever posses powers that enable him to curse anyone, a rare mystery where the absence of a solution actually doesn't elevate the material at all, but instead drags it down the head-scratching hole of pretentiousness.
The final slow-motion scene set in a diner is particularly pointless: it drags unnecessarily on and on, and resolves nothing. Just like the majority of The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
D+
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