Review of The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) by Riff J — 05 Jan 2018

All the dialogue is delivered utterly deadpan so that all the characters seem kind of like robots, and people say things that people wouldn't really say. It's distracting and makes the story boring. About 45 minutes into the movie a minor character, a doctor, enters a scene and speaks perfectly naturally. It's not a particularly important scene, but it was such a relief to hear an actor actually act like a normal human being in this movie. The plot also is very ridiculous - not the main action that the bad guy takes, but the way everyone else reacts to it.

Here is the basics of the plot - spoiler - a boy poisons two siblings, a girl and a boy, because he blames their father for killing his father. Their father is a surgeon who performed an unsuccessful operation on the kid's father. So this is revenge. The problem is that both the father and mother know that this kid has poisoned their children but they do nothing about it. Then while the kids are lingering in the hospital the daughter tells the mother that the mother too will become sick. In other words, the daughter seems to know she's been poisoned and that the kid is also going to poison the mother. But the daughter seems completely OK with all of it, including her own poisoning. The whole thing makes no sense.

At this point, just a little over an hour into the movie, I quit and chalked it up to experience.