The New Cult Canon: 'The Killing of a Sacred Deer'
As a Cincinnati resident who walked into this movie totally blind (based on my enjoyment of Lanthimos' previous films, I decided to avoid reading *anything* about this one ahead of time) while also being fully unaware that it had been filmed here, this movie was a real trip.
Because several significant scenes were shot in downtown locations near my work, including places I typically visited or at least walked past a few times a week, over the course of the film I started to wonder if I was experiencing a random paranoid schizophrenic episode. I knew that I wasn't being stalked by a mad Greek auteur, but at the same time the characters were hanging out in diners where I'd just eaten lunch, or riding their motorcycle past my afternoon bus stop, and in the moment it was horrifying.
On top of everything else in the movie (which I loved!), it felt like a scenario custom-made to creep out downtown Cincinnati denizens, an appropriately perverse "thank you" to the Queen City from Lanthimos himself.
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