Iphigenia at Suburbia
...seen at The Charles theater in Mt Vernon, Baltimore.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer, the new film by Yorgos Lanthimos, might be about potatoes. They are served up dry, rudely splattered with ketchup, and at one point cardiac surgeon Dr. Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell), our hero, or villain because who isn’t in this movie, even has the audacity to request that he might enjoy them mashed, a notion that causes his wife Dr. Anna Murphy (Nicole Kidman) to fly into a rage.
In fairness to Anna, their two children are, at that moment, dying of a mysterious wasting disease that will soon smite her too. The only way to save the family, as revealed by a sixteen year old named Martin – a teenaged version of the banjo boy from Deliverance played by Barry Keoghan whose every eye twitch oozes the uncanny – is for Steven to kill one of them himself. And he’s doing a fairly lousy job of making up his mind about it. Instead, he hides behind medical science and a thick black beard from when he delivers, deadpan, lines like “our daughter just started menstruating” at first hello. Of course, that’s to be expected in a Lanthimos film. Much like in last year’s The Lobster, the characters all seem to have eaten too much cheese and are still waiting to pass stool. They have been stripped down to some bare animal essence, like the line reciters of Kubrick’s later films. Kidman thrives in this environment, a master of the enigmatic look and the stone face of a woman who has learned to bide her time. In a surprising twist, the other female stand out is none other than Alicia Silverstone, in the role of an addled widow, who wants nothing more than to suck on Dr. Steven’s “perfect hands,” a cannibal yearning for flesh.
She isn’t the only one. Every adult male character in this show seems to want to devour somebody. The only real sex scene unfolds less like love making and more like an offering to some monster King Kong: Anna drapes herself naked over the bed as if unconscious – ready to be consumed by her hairy, bearded husband. His mock bites remain just kisses of course. The real ones come later.
Which is not to say that Sacred Deer is especially gory or violent. It’s more like a slow, persistent internal bleed. And the doctors are all moping around asking for mashed potatoes.
And so it goes for exactly two hours and one minute, the characters chattering away in a style both uncomfortably candid and impossibly opaque. Lanthimos jam packs the horrific plot with all manner of irony, daring us to laugh.
The story is a loose retelling of the ancient Greek tragedy of Iphigenia, wherein Agamemnon, leading the Greeks against Troy (the conflict of Homer’s Iliad), kills a sacred deer belonging to the goddess Artemis. Peeved, she becalms his fleet, and demands Agamemnon sacrifice his eldest daughter Iphigenia. The Greek playwright Euripides won awards for his treatment of the story. A thousand or so years later, the French playwright Racine won acclaim for his own.
Lanthimos makes no attempt to hide his sources, inserting multiple references (in addition to the title itself). Which strikes us as odd. Because Sacred Deer is sharp departure from Euripides or Racine. The function of those plays is to bring an audience to the edge of its seat hoping against hope that Iphigenia will be spared. Euripides leaves us shattered. Racine does summersaults to give us a happier ending.
But in the very first frame of The Killing of a Sacred Deer, the screen has already faded to black. A piece by Schubert conjures images of Christ bleeding on the cross. In other words, we begin Sacred Deer knowing full well that somebody is already dead.
The whole is illustrated by wonderful camera work. We cannot think of a film seen in recent years that even comes close. The sensibility is, again, reminiscent of Kubrick and the 1970s with slow zooms in and out, and a tracking shot down a seemingly endless hallway that left us hypnotized. You can debate the merits of the story line, but the film’s style is irreproachable.