Movie Review: The Killing of a Sacred Deer (English)

Is there something called clinical horror? Because after watching movies like Enemy, Nocturnal Animals and now director Yorgos Lanthimos' excellent The Killing of a Sacred Deer, I am more than inclined to believe there has to be a name for movies of this kind, the ones that invoke unnerving paranoia and terror by operating in a visually-striking world that's austere, antiseptic and oftentimes claustrophobic, so much so that it makes the creators' cold-hearted approach to the mind-bending conundrums all the more strangely arresting in inexplicable ways. The killing here is a "metaphor" (a Greek tragedy to be more precise), a balancing act meant to avenge one man's horrifying mistake, and thus what starts off as a creepy, mysterious relationship between a well-off cardiovascular surgeon Steven (who is also somnophilic and a recovering alcoholic) and a 14-year-old Martin (a fantastic Barry Keoghan) spins out of control when his children fall ill all of a sudden, paralysed and refusing food to the point of starvation, leaving Steven with an improbable task of having to choose one among his family to be killed as a sacrificial lamb deer. Evoking themes of guilt, karma and shifting moral allegiances, Lanthimos crafts an eerily disquieting drama, carefully mining its thrills from mundane moments and a deliberately monotonous backdrop, even as he subtly plays with the science and the supernatural.