Review of The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Not really a fan of Kidman, and this movie is a great example why, I think she donned her Stepford Wive's persona for this one...again. A heart surgeon has secret meetings with a teenage boy after unsuccessfully operating on his father. The boy somehow makes the Dr's whole family sick as an act of revenge for drinking on the job, Dr must choose which family member to sacrifice...which he does, randomly. During the film, these's lots of hidden messages in the imagery that you must decipher, and most likely will be attributed to the teenager being an incarnation of the devil, or a hundred other ways that it could be interpreted, of which the director will no doubt take credit for, more ambiguity the better for an artsy film, which is really means being too lazy to figure out a more plausible reason that these events could even be put on screen. The dots do not connect, the acting is definitely questionable, and the plot is just hot air, camera work is interesting, a lot of the placement is following the action, as if hovering from behind, similar to 'Birdman'. The film did have me interested in the outcome, I did want to know the reasoning behind all the sickness, and how he was able to predict it, but for a film to be worth watching, it must address it's central question, at least try and answer it, but it doesn't. So yeh it's an 'Art' film, because you have to decide yourself what it all meant, or be able to recount decades of cinematic references that the director was targeting to unravel all the hidden meaning, which may or may not lead to a logical ending. But me expecting a logical satisfying ending to a film (to which there will be no part 2) is no doubt looked upon as ignorant and docile to all the film noir aficionads's. But I felt ripped off after sitting through that, in a really classic 'film noir' way. I once watched a film where a guy took a crap on a wooden cross, and through the wonders of time lapse photography, a rose eventually grew out of the crap, that was at least slightly satisfying to endure, this one wasn't.