Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay that explores how artificiality is at the heart of the films of Yorgos Lanthimos, especially ‘The Killing of a Sacred Deer.’
If you’ve seen a film by Yorgos Lanthimos you’ve now doubt noticed that his films give off a squirm-inducing strangeness. The Athens-born director’s work — which includes Dogtooth, The Lobster, and The Favorite — radiates with palpable, and purposeful, awkwardness. And that’s part of the appeal. The discomfort that permeates Lanthimos’ filmography is both a tonal calling card and the backbone of his overriding thematic interest with artificiality.
And pinpointing the joints, musculature, and sinew of what makes his films feel so intentionally stilted is a key “in” to appreciating the director’s work. A prominent member of the “Greek Weird Wave,” Lanthimos’ alienated characters and absurdly candid dialogue are a vector for explaining difficult ideas to audiences.
And as the video essay below argues, to understand why artificiality is at the heart of every aspect of Lanthimos’ work you need look no further than The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Adapting one of the more harrowing plot points of Homer’s Illiad, in which King Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, to appease the gods and secure the winds he needs to sail to Troy. In Lanthimos’ tale, an alcoholic heart surgeon named Steven (Colin Farrell) finds himself at the mercy of a young man named Martin (Barry Keoghan), whose father perished under Steven’s knife. Martin announces that Steven must kill one of his two children to pay for what he’s done.
It’s a surreal story that inserts the retributive nightmare logic of myth into the sterile environments of surgical wards and the suburbs. And while our protagonist clings to the tight control he has imposed on his domestic life, everything about The Killing of a Sacred Deer screams at us that there is something sinister and dehumanizing about attempting to visit order on chaos (there’s no other word for how Martin eats spaghetti in this film, if you know you know).
Unpacking various elements of the film from Lanthimos’ frequent use of slow zooms, deserted sets, and isolating shot composition, check out the video below for a look at how Lanthimos’ harnesses awkwardness to terrify us.
Watch “The Synthetic Terror of Yorgos Lanthimos”:
Who made this?
This video essay on how artificiality is central to the horror of The Killing of a Sacred Deer is by Spikima Movies, a Korean-Canadian who’s been dropping gems on YouTube since 2019. You can subscribe to Spikima’s channel for more incredible essays here. And you can follow them on Letterboxd here.
More videos like this
- For another taste of Spikima Movies’ work, here’s their essay on the scariest scene in 2001’s Pulse (a.k.a. Kairo). If you’ve seen the film, you know the one.
- And here’s another sample of Spikima’s work diving deep into the symbology of Bong Joon-ho‘s 2019 Best Picture Award-winning film Parasite.
- And here’s their video essay that takes a look at how the 2016 South Korean horror film The Wailing uses ambiguity to terrify us.
- And finally, here’s Take Two with a look at the similarities between the cinematography in The Killing of a Sacred Deer and the work of Stanley Kubrick.
Related Topics: The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Queue, Yorgos Lanthimos