Whatever you think of 'Sacred Deer,' you'll at least love how Cincinnati is portrayed

As movies go, "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" is a strange concoction that has sharply divided audiences into love-it or hate-it camps. The movie is eerie and macabre; characters often speak in flat tones that make them sound like they are reciting instructions from a how-to book. The film won both accolades and boos at the Cannes Film Festival in May and created a similar divide among early U.S. audiences. Some viewers will be charmed and others repelled when the movie, which stars Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell, opens in theaters on Friday. But no matter what they think of the plot, viewers are sure to be impressed at the appearance of Cincinnati, where the film was shot in the summer of 2016. The Queen City has never looked better. "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" is directed by Greek arthouse darling Yorgos Lanthimos, who previously directed Farrell in the quirky "The Lobster." Lanthimos and co-writer Efthymis Filippou won the best-screenplay award at Cannes for the story, which is inspired by a Greek myth in which Agamemnon offends the goddess Artemis and is ordered to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. The filmmakers did not come to Cincinnati to re-create old New York, as many others have done, but to create a palette of light and dark that mirrors the story about one family's descent from contentment to misery at the hands of a teenage boy called Martin (Barry Keoghan).