I hated every second of The Killing of a Sacred Deer. I felt little outrage, hardly a modicum of disgust, and no sense of being rattled by this Greek pseudo-punk provocateur. I’m not offended by Lanthimos’ repellent style, just bored by it. And I use the word “repellent” to describe his style not as a pejorative judgement but as a description of the effect he’s clearly trying to achieve. From wide-angle lenses, off-kilter framing, ill-timed close-ups, creeping zooms, deviant behavior, eccentric dialogue, and frigid, emotionless acting, he uses every alienating trick he can to repeal his bourgeoise audience. While I’d hardly bemoan the general use of alienation as a technique for unsettling viewers (in the right hands it’s a powerful filmmaking tool), I do have two foremost issues with its deployment in Sacred Deer.
For one, its intention is laughably otiose. Lanthimos’ audience is the cultured bourgeoise whose conventional tastes he’s so eager to offend, yet whom he relies on not only to finance his work but to build a namesake as a “provocateur.” I’m sure he fancies himself persona non grata, the kind of derelict hidden from formal occasions, but really he’s mingling at the soiree telling off-color jokes to a blushing audience whom are all too quick to invite him back to the next one. The Lobster was insufferably idiotic mainly because it extolled itself for satirizing an issue that is nonexistent. It’s the most comfortable form of satire where nothing is ultimately mocked. Sacred Deer, similarly, becomes insufferable, not because it’s offensive, but because its so comfortably inoffensive. Like in Gramsci’s model of hegemony, its the type of resistance that has already been built into and accounted for by the status quo.
For another, it’s a stylistic diversion from its own hollowness. I’m not sure if Lanthimos is even capable of telling a story, creating characters, or using his camera to penetrate into the heart of either. We are alienated from the beginning so much so that we are never given a chance to be drawn in; therefore, nothing that develops feels revelatory or elicits an effect other than indifference. Watch the camera-work: nothing builds, everything slogs through an endless drone or retreats to a sterile distance; close-ups do little to punctuate or turn a scene on its ear. If Lanthimos is daring us to break the chilly distance and care, its an egregious bluff because we don’t or worse can’t. If he doesn’t even want us to care, then the entire film could be shorted to the single scene of Nicole Kidman’s character jacking off the anesthesiologist. It’s essentially all he’s doing. Either way, he loses and so do we.
I’d certainly throw Lanthimos in the same group of bourgeois enfants terrible as von Trier, Haneke, and Ostlünd. Where youthful me was once captivated by von Trier and Haneke’s puckish antics, older me has since become profoundly bored by them. Lanthimos, like Haneke and von Trier, has talent, and I give him credit for the consistency of his filmmaking. He’s commitment to the formalism of alienation is unwavering and precise. Perhaps years ago I would have celebrated him as a firebrand. Now, I just pity his toothlessness.
