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.
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
United Kingdom, Ireland, United States · 2017
Rated R · 2h 1m
Director Yorgos Lanthimos
Starring Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Barry Keoghan, Raffey Cassidy
Genre Drama, Thriller, Mystery
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Dr. Steven Murphy is a renowned cardiovascular surgeon who presides over a spotless household with his wife and two children. Lurking at the margins of his idyllic suburban existence is Martin, a fatherless teen who insinuates himself into the doctor's life in gradually unsettling ways.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In Farrell and Kidman, he has found two performers who are utterly willing to go the whole hog and their performances are brilliant deadpans.
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.
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.
The Telegraph by Robbie Collin
When absurdism feels this wrong, you know it’s being done right.
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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.