One can pinpoint the moment at which The Killing of a Sacred Deer gets stuck, like a train between stations. It happens midway through the film, during a scene set in a hospital cafeteria, somewhere in Cincinnati. A greying, bearded cardiologist (Colin Farrell) sits opposite a teenage boy (Barry Keoghan) whose gormless, sweaty countenance conveys an undertone of menace. The boy, whose name is Martin, explains to Steven, the cardiologist, what is going to happen to Steven’s wife, Anna (Nicole Kidman), and their two children, Kim (Raffey Cassidy) and Bob (Sunny Suljic). One by one these family members will become paralysed – suddenly, and incurably – and then they will die, unless Steven determines to kill one of them first, as a sacrifice.

Advance knowledge of a character’s fate is a requirement of tragedy, but The Killing of a Sacred Deer isn’t one. ‘Don’t get hysterical, it’s not that tragic,’ Kim counsels her mother, as she succumbs to the foretold paralysis. Nor is the film funny in the bleak way that previous films by the same director, Yorgos Lanthimos, have been – in particular, The Lobster (2015), a kind of satire on the notion of true romance, onscreen or off. Shorn of catharsis and short on laughs, The Killing of a Sacred Deer becomes a chilly and ultimately inert rumination on the collapse of a bourgeois family. But the film’s first half, before we know how or why the ruin will occur, is effective.