Jasper Rees

The gloves will come off

What makes this operatic fable sing is the chilling performance of Barry Keoghan as a deadpan teen, sent to destroy the American dream

You know where you aren’t with director Yorgos Lanthimos. The Greek allegorist creates parallel worlds which superficially resemble our own. In Dogtooth an overweening patriarch incarcerates his three adult children in a state of infantilised innocence. The Lobster punishes those unable to find a mate by transfiguring them into animals. His acerbic commentaries on flawed modernity feel like lurid horror stories the ancients forgot to write down.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer invokes pagan sacrifice in its title. Iphigenia is even mentioned in dispatches — the subject of a schoolgirl essay that doubles as a mythological flare. The film opens on a close-up of open-heart surgery in which a sickly pink organ throbs garishly. After the operation two bloodstained surgical gauntlets are tossed into a bin. This is a film in which the gloves will come off.

The surgeon is Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell, bearded like a scraggy Pythagoras), who is married to an ophthalmologist Anna (Nicole Kidman) — hearts and eyes, theirs are a pair of grimly symbolic specialisms. They have a nice nuclear family spaciously domiciled in suburban Cincinnati, the city named after a Roman general. Not everything is sweetly functional in their marriage: Steven likes to beat off to the sight of Anna stripped and draped across the coverlet like a lanky alabaster corpse.

But deeper shadows are lengthening outside the home. Steven has secret, regular contact with Martin (Barry Keoghan), a deadpan teen who has some kind of vice-like hold over him. Is he the product of a previous relationship? An illegal squeeze? No, he’s the son of a patient who earlier died under Steven’s knife. It’s an unsettling liaison fuelled by unspoken blackmail. Steven guiltily feeds Martin, and gives him time, literally in the form of an expensive watch.

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