60
Time Out London by Dave Calhoun
As storytelling, it’s pristine: it moves like a reptile playing the long game. But its cruelty is tough to bear.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
83
Fortunately, the filmmaker’s rare gift for brutal absurdity remains intact, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer only gets funnier as it grows darker.
100
The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney
The rich vein of unsettling darkness and psychological unease that ripples like a treacherous underground stream beneath the absurdist humor of Yorgos Lanthimos' work becomes a brooding requiem of domestic horror in his masterfully realized fifth feature.
80
New York Magazine (Vulture) by Emily Yoshida
To see an unfettered nightmare like this from such an idiosyncratic director feels like a cruel treat, and a welcome stylistic stretch.
42
The Film Stage by Giovanni Marchini Camia
Even the most generous of viewers couldn’t come up with a legitimate reason for the vileness on show here, other than pure and simple sadism.
100
The Killing of a Sacred Deer is Lanthimos with the gloves off, and it makes the absurd, amazing “The Lobster” seem like a warm and cuddly experience by comparison.
80
In Farrell and Kidman, he has found two performers who are utterly willing to go the whole hog and their performances are brilliant deadpans.
90
Screen International by Jonathan Romney
This is a ruthlessly controlled drama that achieves its powerful effect by holding back when its dramatic content is most intense.
80
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
It’s an intriguing, disturbing, amusing twist on something which in many ways could be a conventional horror-thriller from the 1970s or 1980s, or even a bunny-boiler nightmare from the 90s.
100
The Telegraph by Robbie Collin
When absurdism feels this wrong, you know it’s being done right.
Terrifying and grotesquely absurd, but so masterfully done that I never once questioned it
Utterly captivating in its controlled, deliberate build up of tension and psychological horror. It works so well in part because of how much the cast commits to selling the absurdity of this world.