“The Killing of a Sacred Deer”

***

(R, 2:01)

The tone of “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” is the best thing about it and the hardest to describe. You might call it skewed, but it is also quiet and precise. It remains slightly but consistently twisted throughout, without ever backing off from its tone nor slopping into extremes.

Every single thing is off. Dr. Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell) is a heart surgeon, but he smokes; in fact, he smokes different brands in different scenes. A teenage girl meets a boy around her age, and the first thing she says is, ”I just got my period for the first time.“

You might think that the goal of director (and co-writer) Yorgos Lanthimos is absurdism for its own sake, or maybe absurdism as some statement about the upper middle class. In fact, he’s after something a lot more interesting. He is creating a climate in which extreme things can happen and yet seem almost normal, without having to resort to having the soundtrack thunder into an echo chamber. It might even be a day or two after seeing it before it sinks in that “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” is a horror movie, and a good one.

It begins with a heart beating inside an opened-up chest cavity. Lanthimos lingers and lingers on the shot, so that we get through squeamishness and the strangeness of it.

Seconds later, we’re meeting the heart surgeon, and he’s so much less than the organ he works on, just a rather stiff fellow who wants to buy a new watch. He meets up with a teenager named Martin (Barry Keoghan), and they have a conversation that, like all conversations in the movie, is a bit disconnected. Murphy seems like a mentor of some kind, but he also seems anxious to keep Martin at a distance; and Martin seems determined to breach that distance.

Murphy also has a bizarre disconnection with his wife (Nicole Kidman) and two children, a boy (Sunny Suljic) and a teenage girl (Raffey Cassidy). These are cold, odd characters, yet we care about them.

Precisely how “The Killing of the Sacred Deer“ qualifies as a horror movie is best discovered in the viewing. But it should be said that Keoghan’s ability to make his blue eyes go completely dead — to seem menacing even as he’s being mild — is the acting marvel of this peculiar movie.