Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has been responsible for some of the most provocative and peculiar films of the past decade. His Oscar-nominated movie "Dogtooth" (2009) depicted a married couple who had kept their grown-up children confined at home for their entire lives. "The Lobster" (2015) — his first film in English, and an unlikely cult hit — was set in a world in which coupledom is legally mandated, and those who can't find a romantic partner are transformed into animals.
Lanthimos' latest feature, "The Killing of a Sacred Deer," opens with a graphic depiction of open-heart surgery, but that's just an appetizer for the portentous drama that follows. Loosely inspired by the Euripides tragedy "Iphigenia in Aulis," it tells of a successful surgeon (Colin Farrell) who finds himself forced to atone for the death of a patient in the grimmest of fashions: by choosing to sacrifice a member of his own family.
Yet describing the premises of Lanthimos' movies doesn't fully capture the unsettling quality they possess. They hover between comedy, surrealism and nihilistic drama, all delivered with a deadpan restraint that makes their intentions harder to parse.