★★★★☆

THOSE who have been following the distinctly idiosyncratic career of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos that has included the likes of Dogtooth and the Oscar-nominated The Lobster should find it no surprise that his latest effort is an at once bewitching and deeply unsettling concoction that will linger long in the memory.

The story follows renowned cardiovascular surgeon Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell, reuniting with The Lobster director) who presides as the patriarch of a family that includes his ophthalmologist wife Anna (Nicole Kidman), 12-year-old son Bob (Sunny Suljic) and 14-year-old daughter Kim (Raffey Cassidy) living in a pristine household.

One day he decides to take under his wing a subdued but curious teenage boy named Martin (rising Irish star Barry Keoghan) following the death of the boy’s father. It’s a decision Steven begins to regret, however, when Martin’s behaviour becomes increasingly sinister as his true intentions are revealed.

On the surface this seems to be Lanthimos’s most “normal” film to date; it initially leads us down a fairly accessible and grounded road about a man trying to assuage his guilt by befriending a boy who is concealing his grief with a blank, almost impenetrable public persona.

We quickly find that those supposedly placid waters run deep and strange, plunging us with an icy hand further under the surface of creeping dread, haunting imagery (including an opening sequence that depicts real-life open-heart surgery in graphic detail) and unashamedly allegorical narrative layering, not least in its referential and loaded title taken from the sacrificing of Iphigenia in Euripides’ Greek tragedy.

The film is ostensibly a family drama about a man trying to protect his loved ones but shot through Lanthimos’s incomparable filter that, love it or hate it, is impossible to ignore. He constructs and conducts a cinematic domain at once tangible and eerily otherworldly, populated with characters that seem more like ideas of human beings, speaking as they do in peculiar, almost robotic dialogue.

And yet there’s something deeply powerful and ironically human about The Killing of a Sacred Deer. This is not just in how Lanthimos and continuing writing collaborator Efthymis Filippou finds ways to punctuate the enigmatic, the head-scratching or the downright horrifying into moments of emotionally weighted profundity but also with the first rate performances by its expertly assembled cast.

Farrell continues to do some of his strongest work to date for Lanthimos with a character that feels like a distant relation to his character in The Lobster, delivering the purposefully detached dialogue with strangely believable sincerity. Kidman brings real graceful poise and restraint to the difficult role of the family’s matriarch looming large particularly whenever the drama moves inside their idyllic home.

But it’s Keoghan who steals this odd cinematic show with a mesmerising performance of an altogether different kind of human monster. Seen recently in Christopher Nolan’s Second World War epic Dunkirk, Keoghan brings a special kind of unnerving quality to the crucial role of Martin who puts so much of the fraught heartache in motion, whether it being in his menacing deadpan morality speeches or penetrative stares at those who become his target.

It’s a film that sends you away unsettled and unsure what to make of it, born out of a filmmaker’s unique view of humanity that strikes an impressive tonal high-wire act of sustained awkwardness, atmospheric dread and progressively darker narrative turns that force us to confront some difficult what if questions. It’s a powerful, challenging journey well worth embarking upon.