Yorgos Lanthimos brings his flat voices and long corridors to America and builds a revenge tragedy of sickening force, with Barry Keoghan remarkable in it. It is controlled to the last frame and runs out of things to do before it runs out of film.
Yorgos Lanthimos’s second film in English, after The Lobster (2015), opens on a human heart, beating, filmed from directly above during open surgery while a choir sings. The hands belong to Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell), a cardiac surgeon with a beard, a large house and a wife, Anna (Nicole Kidman), who agrees with most of what he says. He also has a teenage friend called Martin (Barry Keoghan), whose father died on his table, and he is not telling anyone why they meet. Then Martin explains what Steven owes him, and the film spends its second hour collecting. It is as controlled a piece of work as Lanthimos has made, and it is worth your evening if you can bear it. We are less sure it is more than an exercise.
Thimios Bakatakis shoots the hospital and the house on wide lenses from low down or high up, so ceilings press on people and corridors run away to nothing. His camera drifts in behind Steven as he walks, then zooms slowly from a great distance, as if something at the far end of the ward were watching and had all day. Jade Healy’s Murphy house is glass, pale wood and long empty landings, big enough that the family are always a room apart. Nancy Steiner dresses them in clean, expensive neutrals and gives Martin the same shabby clothes in every scene, so he looks like a mark on the furniture. Nobody raises their voice for two hours, and the pressure builds anyway.
Farrell and Kidman speak the script by Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou as if reading it off a form. Steven tells colleagues at a party that his daughter has just had her first period, in the tone he would use for the weather. Anna lies still on the bed and offers him a general anaesthetic. Kidman is doing something precise and quite frightening here: she plays a woman who has organised her life as a series of correct answers, and then watches the questions change. Bill Camp, as Steven’s colleague Matthew, gets the one scene in which two men argue about blame and the deadpan almost cracks, and he plays it well.
Keoghan is the reason to see it. Martin lists what will happen to the Murphys, one symptom after another, in the hospital cafeteria with a plate of chips in front of him, in the voice of a boy giving directions to the shops. He apologises. He means it, or he does not, and Keoghan never lets you settle. It is a performance built out of politeness, and the politeness is the horror.
We should say what it did to us. The first of Martin’s predictions comes true within the hour, and Lanthimos films the child’s body failing in long, level shots from the far end of the ward while his father stands and watches. We felt sick, then angry at the film for making us watch, then aware that this was exactly the reaction it wanted and that being right about it did not make us like it more. Yorgos Mavropsaridis holds shots long past the point of comfort and cuts away only when we have stopped hoping he will. The music is borrowed rather than written for the film, choral and string pieces that scrape and swell, and it is mixed to hurt.
The trouble is what comes after the announcement. The film states its rules and then must keep them, and there is no move left except the one the title promises. The title points at Euripides and Agamemnon’s dead deer, and the script mentions Iphigenia in case we miss it. The second hour repeats the first at a lower volume: another examination, another refusal, another calm conversation about who should die. Because the children talk in the same flat voice as the adults, we never quite believe in them as children, and the stakes thin out exactly when they should be unbearable. Dogtooth (2009) used the same manner and had a whole family under it; The Lobster had jokes. This has a curse and a clock. Alicia Silverstone appears for one scene as Martin’s mother, it is the funniest scene in the film, and then she is gone.
It runs 121 minutes and carries a 15 certificate, and both feel about right. See it in a cinema if you can, in the dark, with no distractions, because at home you will reach for your phone during the slow zooms and the film needs you not to. Bring no one you would like to eat with afterwards.
