Yorgos Lanthimos on His New Film <em>The Killing of a Sacred Deer</em>
Yorgos Lanthimos first gained international recognition as a Greek filmmaker with a taste for a particular sort of black comedy, making movies (including Kinetta, Alps, and 2009’s Oscar-nominated Dogtooth) that had one foot in science fiction and another in body horror, and yet still managed to provoke laughs with nightmare scenarios. He broke out in 2015 with The Lobster, starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, a surreal epic set in a world where single people are sent to a hotel to try and find love, and are condemned to be turned into an animal of their choice should they fail. At once sweetly heartbreaking and mesmerizingly disturbing, the film was a cult hit that got a surprise Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
Lanthimos’s newest film, , re-teams him with Farrell in a very different role: While Farrell played the loveless sad-sack protagonist of here he’s a successful heart surgeon named Steven who has a beautiful wife (played by an eminently poised Nicole Kidman), two children, and an expensive home. Steven takes the teenager Martin (Barry Keoghan) under his wing after the death of Martin’s father on his operating table, and things turn sinister as the teen begins to exact an elemental sort of revenge, forcing Steven to make a frightening choice about the future of
