Killing of a Sacred Deer examines American manhood under siege
The title of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s taut new thriller, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, evokes Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978).
But unlike that touchstone Vietnam movie, The Killing of a Sacred Deer has nothing to do with the mythology of hunting. In fact, other than a few shots of the family dog and a fish being filleted for dinner, there aren’t even any animals in it.
This is surprising, because Lanthimos’s previous film, The Lobster (2015), features many animals. In fact, in the bizarre future depicted in The Lobster, people are surgically remade as animals if they unsuccessful at finding a mate.
Despite this difference, though, the two films definitely share writer/director Lanthimos’s distinctively weird vision of the world.
While The Lobster is set in an odd, imaginative future, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is set in the recognizably real world. Shot in the mundane city of Cincinnati, Ohio, it looks like anywhere U.S.A. If Colin Farrell’s character is a loser in The Lobster, in Sacred Deer he is a complete success. Here he plays a successful heart surgeon, Steven Murphy, with a picture-perfect home, beautiful wife Anna (Nicole Kidman), and two wonderful children, teenager daughter Kim (Raffey Cassidy) and young son Bob (Sunny Suljic).
The family is well regulated, with ongoing discussion about which child is responsible on which day for watering the plants or walking the aforementioned dog. Lanthimos tends to frame the shots in the Murphy household symmetrically, placing the family and their tasteful furniture in balanced but static arrangements that suggest their true emotional rigidity.
But this world will soon become imbalanced and crumble horribly.
As we learn, Steven has befriended a teenage boy, Martin (brilliantly played by Barry Keoghan), whose father had died on his operating table after an accident. Martin holds Dr. Murphy responsible for his father’s
death and seeks what he regards as justice. He worms his way into the Murphy family only to exact his merciless revenge, which I won’t give away here. Suffice it to say that Martin somehow invokes a retribution of biblical proportion.
How this supernaturally tinged revenge works is not explained. Perhaps it is a curse, like that endured in Stephen King’s Thinner or Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell (2009).
On one level, The Killing of a Sacred Deer belongs to a cycle of frightening films I call yuppie horror. Stephen King described the original Amityville Horror (1979) as the first “horror movie as economic nightmare,” and in the 1990s this subgenre really kicked in with Pacific Heights (1990), Unlawful Entry (1992) and Bad Influence (1990), among others. These movies all depict upwardly mobile characters whose professional success and material possessions are disrupted by monstrous villains that bring about economic hardship.
The casting in Sacred Deer of Alicia Silverstone, who starred in the yuppie thriller The Crush (1993), as Martin’s creepy mother makes the connection explicit.
Lanthimos presents Martin’s supernatural retribution as matterof-factly and as eerily as everything else in the movie, beginning with the way he initially encourages our worst thoughts about Steven’s relationship with the boy. By the time Martin’s mom insists to Steven when he comes to dinner that “You’re not leaving until you taste my tart!” everything oozes with ominous portent.
Whatever the explanation for the tragic fate that awaits the Murphy family, it is clear from the film’s opening shots of Steven in surgery holding a beating heart that matters of life and death are ultimately in his hands. So, in a way, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is similar to The Deer Hunter in that both films examine traditional notions of American manhood under siege.