The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

(dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)

This film did not need its soundtrack. I feel like everything that was wrong with the film – exaggeration, contrived discomfort – is encapsulated in the soundtrack. It was good music supervision but it didn’t need to happen.

Piling on every trick in the well-thumbed book of making viewers feel uneasy, this is Caché, Force Majeure, Enemy, and nothing new.
Despite the genuinely original ideas and cruelly hilarious writing, by playing these hands all at the same time it felt forced and numbed. Too many cooks, too many cooks. Perhaps it would’ve worked better as some kind of strange TV series split into 10 minutes episodes.

We’re used to certain kind of voices, speech patterns and relationships in films – all flowing, coherent and sensical, so funnily enough I didn’t find Sacred Deer‘s twisted and stilted rhythm of speech that disconcerting at all; it rang truer to real life, which trips, pauses and stutters. Especially when confused, which I guess is this film’s whole *~/thing\~*.

Barry Keoghan is some kind of We Need To Talk About Kevin’s Ezra Miller meets Rasputin, a top-notch actor unfortunately coloured by shades of the desperation to shock that similarly characterised (and depleted) the quality of A Serbian Film.

Nicole Kidman puts her usual effort into the role which pays off, and ol’ Colin is as earnest as ever. Perhaps the use of familiar faces was intended to further creep us out, but I reckon smaller-time actors would’ve helped make the escapist nature of the story feel more genuine.

The Beguiled (2017)

(dir. Sofia Coppola)

I suppose the overarching moral of this story is: it’s all shits and giggles until someone giggles and shits. Or perhaps it was coquettish-ness, not curiosity, that killed the cat?

I am not familiar with Don Siegel’s 1971 allegedly racier film adaptation of the same Thomas P Cullinan novel, but the sideways glances, provocative comments and simmering sexual tension of Coppola’s version feels much more suited to the self-conscious and aloof methods of modern-day lover-hunting, albeit wearing Civil War-era sheep’s clothing.

Lady Martha (Nicole Kidman) along with her deputy Edwina (Kirsten Dunst) head up a rural Virginia boarding school set in a tangle of overgrown rose bushes, eerie mists, with rumbling war cannons as a soundtrack and a disconcerting stillness that draws attention to the lithe movements of the school attendees: a sharp gaggle with both Christian conduct and caustic wit. We are interested in the bright and intrepid Amy (Oona Laurence), and the 18-year-old Alicia (Elle Fanning), who has more than outgrown innocent flirtation. Both a delight to watch.

Sunlight streams through gaps between the foreboding trees and lends an illusion of a web-like structure, this together with the silky purity of the girls’ dress draw attention to the way this unusual bad-galdem gang undulate as a group, particularly when they carry the wounded soldier Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell) into their nest, like a widow spider anthropomorphised.

It’s all girly giggles at the dinner table, casual over-embellishment to impress and earnest expressions of love shared too early until the logistics of having only one male suitor and more than one swooning lady comes to brutal daylight.

Mandatory viewing with William Oldroyd’s recent release Lady Macbeth, it feels like we are finally getting the complex female leads we’ve been waiting for, albeit through using the explosive vindictiveness that supposedly comes from female sexual cabin fever.
Both Coppola and Oldroyd leave us with sweet spots for arguments on “whose fault” it is for the ensuing carnage, and it really feels like a cinematic corner is being turned at the moment in exploring male-female power dynamics. Arousing stuff.