Surfaces are deceiving. Director Yorgos Lanthimos all but screams this idea in the opening shot of The Killing of a Sacred Deer: An exposed and beating heart, filmed with almost pornographic frankness, beats during open-heart surgery. The shot might also be the director’s way of preparing the audience for what’s to come—not that there’s all that much blood in Sacred Deer (though there certainly is some), but that you’ll have to be willing to tolerate a certain amount of squeamishness. Lanthimos’ morality play uses the myth of Iphigenia—who was sacrificed by her father to appease the gods—as a springboard, but it’s the mythology of cinema that Lanthimos is intent on exploding as he uses sterile, slow, almost Kubrickian imagery to interrogate the story. What’s happening onscreen isn’t important. What’s going on beneath the surface is.