The Killing of a Sacred Deer
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
From the ancients to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Greek mythology has long influenced storytellers and creators. Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos pays his respects to the myth of Iphigenia in The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
According to the legend, King Agamemnon accidentally killed Artemis’ sacred deer. As a consequence, the goddess demanded he sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. In Lanthimos’ film, Artemis is not some beautiful almighty being, but an awkward, creepy adolescent boy, Martin (Barry Keoghan).
He accepts a combination of unusual attention and expensive gifts from Steven ( Colin Farrell), a surgeon whom Martin later claims is responsible for the death of his father on the operating table. When the boy begins to stalk Steven’s family, the surgeon stops returning his phone calls, and the gifts he bestowed upon Martin are revealed for their true transactional nature. The boy curses Steven’s family with medical problems that will persist until the father chooses one of them to die, or, worse yet, until their bodies all fail.
Steven’s youngest child Bob (Sunny Suljic) is the first to lose all sensation in his legs, followed by his daughter Kim (Raffey Cassidy) — a paralysis that cannot be explained by any medical tests or top- of- the- field doctors. This being a Lanthimos film, mysterious metaphysical phenomena are l eft unexplained, much like the premise of his film The Lobster, in which people who fail at monogamous coupling are forced to be turned into animals of their choosing.
Why Martin has the magical ability to exact such specific physical changes to his victims’ bodies requires no explanation. The Greek director seems uninterested in the details of his supernatural story. He’s content to make the viewer suffer through his modern-day parable and exploit the fundamental narrative blocks of Greek mythology without actually imbuing them with any interesting contemporary relevance.
Lanthimos’ style is often cold, artful, and exact. In his latest, he chooses to season the film with classical music that lends it a serious, macabre tone. Further distancing the movie from audiences is the mechanical monotone dialogue — a mechanism that borrows greatly from the cinemas of Michael Haneke and Stanley Kubrick.
It’s an overdone style for European film makers— the latest films of Haneke, for example, demonstrate a similar pointless clinicalness — and often these films are critical of bourgeois values. Here, Steve’s pragmatic lifestyle is parodied to the point of ridicule. Yes, the health professional status he shares with his ophthalmologist wife Anna ( Nicole Kidman) has led to a pristine family home, but the kinds of conversations they have — like Steve’s casual mention of his daughter’s commencement of menses to his coworkers — is supposed to somehow reveal the soulless nature of such a lifestyle.
Only until Steve is put under an inescapable moral dilemma based on his own cowardice and shame is he finally challenged in life. That’s about the only point that Sacred Deer has to make, and it’s something that the media- literate viewer will grasp pretty quickly. But now this same viewer must sit through the logical progression of Lanthimos’ sadistic plot, fully aware of the filmmaker’s intended statement.
So, Steve is yet another useless male character who’s hidden his flaws under the professional protection of his powerful white medical coat — so what? Lanthimos and his European art house contemporaries offer us no solution or sense of authentic human experience in their overly stylized criticisms of cowardice in white, middle- class masculinity. Hence, viewing experiences like Sacred Deer become torturous exercises that don’t enliven us or make us think. Instead, it’s a waste of cinema. ∂∂