Cannes 2017: The Killing Of A Sacred Deer, film review – Nicole Kidman draws us into a weird dark world

Welcome back to the world of Yorgos Lanthimos — a bit like Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, except genuinely nasty.

For all the horror, The Lobster, which took the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2015, could be enjoyed as a grotesque satire on dating. The Killing Of A Sacred Deer is more perverse, more extreme, as though Lanthimos now wants to rival David Lynch.

Colin Farrell is a wealthy, fêted heart surgeon, Steven. He has a strangely deferential relationship with an odd 16-year-old boy, Martin (Barry Keoghan, great presence). It emerges that Martin’s father died on Steven’s operating table when Steven was drunk — and now he wants vengeance.

Through some never explained power, unless Steven agrees to kill one member of his family — wife Anna (Nicole Kidman, well adapted to this weirdness), teenage daughter Kim (Raffey Cassidy) or little son Bob (Sunny Sulic) — all will die, first becoming paralysed and unable to eat.

​Lanthimos’s world is highly stylised as always, here not least in everybody being inexplicably Irish, save Kidman. Everybody speaks formally, however terrible what they are saying is, and they move with similar woodenness. Sex is peculiar from the off, Anna offering Steve the pleasures of “general anaesthesia” (playing dead).

People are repeatedly filmed from a very low angle, making them seem strange even if little is happening. The musical soundtrack is not so much ominous as permanently hysterical. The rules of the game are absurd and terrible but they have to be followed. All the family accept that.

Perhaps The Killing Of A Sacred Deer is about the mortal responsibilities of those with our lives in their hands (Steven’s hands feature large)? And the impossibility of making such a stark choice within a family?

But it also feels as though Lanthimos simply relishes conducting us into body horror, into his dark place, too. It earned him boos here in Cannes this morning.