The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou did not take the Cannes screenplay prize outright; it was shared with Lynne Ramsay for You Were Never Really Here. Lanthimos says the resemblance to the Iphigenia of Euripides surfaced only once writing was under way, and that they kept the reference on purpose. The flat, uninflected delivery is a method, built in at the audition. Barry Keoghan describes reading lines while bouncing a tennis ball off the floor or throwing a pen in the air, the point being to stop actors attaching feeling to words, and says Lanthimos never once told him how to deliver a line. Colin Farrell says the two of them never discussed the character’s state of mind at all. There is no composed score. The film uses Schubert, Bach and Sofia Gubaidulina with Janne Rättyä’s accordion, and Raffey Cassidy, who plays the daughter, sings Ellie Goulding’s Burn herself. Thimios Bakatakis shot on negative, setting 10, 12 and 17 millimetre ultra wides against 85 to 150 millimetre lenses for close-ups. Production was based in Cincinnati, at The Christ Hospital. A good fit if you take Martin announcing his terms over a plate of spaghetti, voice never raised, as the harshest thing here. Not for viewers who want a medical or supernatural cause for the children’s paralysis; the film never names one.