The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)
Slow-building, sinister, and unapologetically bizarre, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, directed by Greek absurdist Yorgos Lanthimos from a screenplay co-written by him and Efthimis Filippou, puts an idiosyncratic spin on the eye-for-an-eye revenge horror narrative, with a trio of compelling lead performances counterbalancing the filmmakers' stilted dialogue. Unfortunately, a gallery of distinctly unreal characters breed a dreamlike, Twilight Zone-adjacent atmosphere that holds the viewer at arm's length and prevents the inevitable, nihilistic resolution from reaching its full heart-wrenching potential.
The title, one of the more memorable and distinctive in modern horror, is technically derived from part of the story of the ancient Greek tragedy, Iphigenia in Aulis, by Euripides. However, within the context of the movie that bears its name, the "sacred deer" in question refers to a human being, specifically one of the three loved ones of a cardiac surgeon named Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell), who must be sacrificed in order to compensate for Murphy's unintentional taking of the life of a disturbed teenage boy's father from three years earlier. No matter how good your intentions may always be, no matter the fact that your elected occupation typically results in the saving, not taking, of lives, no matter how much money you make or how clean and affluent your neighborhood is, there is no escaping the cold, unforgiving, and relentless inevitability of justice. As humans, we are inherently fallible, including the brainiest and kindest and wealthiest among us, and for Steven, his single transgression, born out of a since-renounced dependency on alcohol, has finally caught up to him, and it will be his family tasked with paying the ultimate penalty.
Steven Murphy is a well-liked and renowned cardiothoracic surgeon who lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with his wife, Anna (Nicole Kidman), herself an ophthalmologist, their two children, Kim (Raffey Cassidy), a choral prodigy, and Bob (Sunny Suljic), a budding pianist, and their dog (who, thankfully, will remain unharmed in a pleasant subversion of the "dead dog" motif). For the last six months, Steven has been furtively dividing his time between his family and a mysterious 16-year-old boy named Martin Lang (Barry Keoghan), whose father was a patient of Steven's and passed away three years prior while under his watch. As a ritual, Steven and Martin meet up at a diner and enjoy a slice of apple pie. Assuming the role of a surrogate father to the lonely and socially awkward boy, Steven gifts him an expensive watch, takes a walk with him to a river, and buys him an ice cream cone, as if to fill the void left in Martin's life by his own father.
However, what begins as an exploration of the markedly strange and somewhat inappropriate yet apparently harmless relationship between an adult surgeon and a grief-stricken teenager insidiously deteriorates into a twisted portrait of obsession and disproportionate vengeance, culminating in supernatural horror once Bob, the youngest of the Murphy children, awakens one morning to the realization that he's lost sensation in both of his legs. It's at this precise moment when The Killing of a Sacred Deer unmasks its true identity as an absurdist revenge fantasy unlike any other presented by the horror genre.
Lanthimos lays bare his stubborn refusal to cave in to conventionality straight from the opening shot. At the start of his absurdist supernatural horror tale, we are presented with a pitch-black screen, which Lanthimos holds for an unsettlingly extended period, to the point of making the viewer wonder whether their TV is functioning. The only sound playing over the blackness is that of ominous, soulful choral music. Once the screen finally brightens, Lanthimos assaults our vision with a close-up of an exposed, beating heart in the middle of an operation. This grotesque image kills two birds with one stone: it captures the protagonist in the throes of his livelihood and suffuses the atmosphere with instant, squirm-inducing unease. We don't know the identity of the person receiving the open heart surgery or whether they made it out alive, but the prognosis appears bleak and soul-crushing, setting the tone for the remainder of the nightmare waiting patiently to emerge.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer, oddly enough, bears a slight thematic resemblance to The Blair Witch Project, itself a blend of supernatural and psychological horror. The threats of both films are supernatural in nature, yet they create the deceptive appearance of naturalism. In the found-footage campfire spook-fest, a trio of would-be documentarians enters the haunted woods of Elly Kedward and fall under her spell. On the surface, it appears they've simply gotten themselves lost, unable to find their car, walking in circles, resorting to blaming each other and gradually losing their sanity. Only toward the end, after one of them goes missing in the night, do they determine they're being hunted by a supernatural presence that has trapped them in an inescapable spider web. In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Lanthimos never has us questioning that what the Murphy family is experiencing are the physical effects of a supernatural curse placed on them by the vindictive Martin. However, in the eyes of their scientifically inclined doctors, Bob and Kim's sudden and unaccountable paralysis and refusal to eat must be psychosomatic, as a series of tests indicates that there's nothing physically wrong with them.
The most striking attribute of The Killing of a Sacred Deer is without a doubt the cinematography by Thimios Bakatakis, whose camera angles and movements are downright Kubrickian in their spareness and disorientation. He generates and sustains a stifling atmosphere of otherworldly menace through tracking shots of Steven and sometimes others, like his colleague, Matthew (Bill Camp), simply walking down the interminably long, sterile, snow-white hallways of their hospital. In an instance of mild variety that reaffirms Lanthimos' preoccupation with hallways, Steven walks down that of his children's school en route to the principal's office. Bakatakis' camera tracks the characters from both the front and behind, moving so fast that the walls on either side appear to be moving along with the characters between them. The Killing of a Sacred Deer transpires in an alternative reality. On the surface, everything appears normal and glamorous. The setting is an affluent neighborhood in which every home is luxurious. Even Martin's home, which he describes as "not so nice," in a "not-so-nice neighborhood," is perfectly spacious and functional. The people inhabiting this world are made of flesh and blood, vulnerable to the limitations of mortality. And yet, there's something distinctly inhuman, unnatural, and alien about them. All the luxury and wealth in the world can't save the Murphys from paying the nightmarish price for the lethal negligence of their patriarch, someone firmly and foolishly convinced that a surgeon could never be responsible for the tragic outcome of a patient.
Frequently, Steven and Anna are filmed standing behind tall, glass windows to symbolize their isolation from reality and reflect Lanthimos' skewed mirror version thereof. Bakatakis zooms in on and away from characters slowly. One night, Steven stands motionlessly in front of his kitchen window, staring out listlessly into the darkness, and the camera films him through the window before slowly zooming out, visualizing the happiness and comfortability being strategically ripped away from him. Following Bob's miraculous but short-lived recovery, Bakatakis films him and Anna from the godlike vantage point of an overhead shot as they walk down the escalator of the hospital, suggesting an omnipresent force watching them, deriving sadistic glee from their ignorance and momentary relief, waiting for the perfect moment to snap its fingers and permanently rob Bob of the autonomy of his legs. The ride downward takes on the symbolism of a slow descent into Hell, as the second Bob reaches the bottom of the escalator, his legs once again give out and he collapses on the floor.
For the sex scenes between Farrell and Kidman, Steven possesses the alarming kink of preferring Anna to resemble a patient ready for open heart surgery. Kidman nakedly lies sprawled open like a starfish in bed, and Lanthimos positions a bedpost in front of her privates to afford her a degree of privacy from the camera, save a distant view of her bare breasts. Bakatakis uses close-ups of his actors' faces to capture their steadily mounting desperation and powerlessness, occasionally raising his camera slightly above their foreheads. In a seemingly unimportant yet striking touch, Kidman is filmed from her side on a couple occasions: her silent breakdown into Matthew's arms in response to Kim falling ill, and the moment she witnesses Martin's power in effect. Dutch tilts are employed to transfer the characters' psychological disorientation to the viewer and reflect the fractured reality in which they're living. Bakatakis pans his camera to track the movements of Steven and Anna from the left side of their bedroom to the right, creating an immersive documentarian sensation. In his most serenely beautiful shot, he begins with a close-up of Kim's face as she serenades Martin with an impressive, if slightly high-pitched, rendition of Ellie Goulding's "Burn" then slowly zooms away to reveal her leaning against a towering tree.
The score is foreboding and screechy. An eerie synth accompanies Martin's early appearances to intimate his rising obsession and antagonistic ulterior motives. The clang of kitchen utensils as they crash onto the floor is amplified to a deafening volume. When Steven beats Martin in his basement, threatening to shoot him if he doesn't reverse the curse, the composers turn to a discordant piano score, sounding like someone slamming their hands down on piano keys repeatedly at random. It's an easy substitute for real mood music, but it's shrill, jarring, and effective all the same.
Under the clinical direction of Lanthimos, every member of the cast is directed to deliver intentionally stilted lines in a robotic voice. While these artistic choices are unquestionably deliberate, born from the filmmaker's ingrained refusal to conform to the customs of Hollywood cinema, they nevertheless come with the unavoidable consequence of lessening our emotional attachment to his characters and sabotaging his ability to beget poignancy for their tragic circumstances. Fortunately, the strength of the uniformly committed performances maintains our investment in this surrealistic nightmare of comeuppance. Colin Farrell, sporting a bushy, black beard with streaks of rapidly aging gray, and a pair of intense, fatigued eyes, provides a sturdy and dispassionate presence as the well-meaning but hopelessly pigheaded Steven. A man of science who appears to be living his best life, working the perfect job that saves other people's lives and earns enough money to afford the perfect house for his beautiful wife and precocious children, Steven tries to show consideration to Martin, at first glance to fill the void left by Martin's father, but in actuality to repent for his former sin of alcoholism-fueled negligence which directly led to his untimely passing. If it wasn't for Steven having consumed two drinks before operating on Martin's father, he would've emerged from his surgery alive and healthier than ever. But Steven would rather put that fatal work error behind him and bury his head in the affluent-green sand, shifting the blame to Matthew, chowing down on Anna's food and expressing his craving for mashed potatoes and to take a family trip to their beach house.
Farrell contains Steven's steadily ratcheting frustration and powerlessness within a placid exterior. As his faith in science begins to crumble under the weight of the inescapable supernatural consequences thrust upon him, Steven loses his composure, banging on Martin's front door, screaming irrational, violent threats of murder, rape, and imprisonment into the windows, belittling his wife's profession in front of his colleagues. A private moment in which Steven breaks down in tears of despair outside his home in the dark highlights both his humanity and acknowledgement of his fallibility.
In the role of Farrell's relentless adversary, Barry Keoghan is as blood-curdling as he is cold-blooded. A 23-year-old adult with the boyish charisma and hair-free face of a 16-year-old, Keoghan assumes ownership of Martin Lang and plays him like he was born for the role. From the moment we meet Martin sitting across from Steven at a diner, Keoghan inhabits every facet of this conspicuously disturbed teenager, portraying him in two contrasting modes. At first glance, he makes Martin appear introverted, goodhearted, and heartbreakingly lonely, suggesting a position on the spectrum. He clings to Steven with the persistence and desperation of a little boy aching for someone to fill the shoes of his late father, progressively growing more obsessed, threatening, and possessive as his demands are refused. Keoghan's eyes are as lifeless and inflexible as his sinister monotone. With a pronounced indent on his left cheek, his face looks vaguely deformed, yet his demeanor is charming and courteous in the vein of a teenage Hannibal Lecter.
His most astonishing feat is his ability to freeze the blood by simply sitting still in a chair, twirling a fork in a plate of spaghetti (framed in a uniquely unsettling close-up), shoveling the noodles in his mouth, leaving behind a speck of tomato sauce on his chin. As Martin recounts a painful memory that obliterated his belief that the way he and his dad ate spaghetti was singular, Keoghan repeats certain words to emphasize his disillusionment. "Later, of course, I found out that everyone eats spaghetti the exact same way. Exact same way. Exact same way." When Martin divulges his nefarious intentions to Steven, no longer content to wear a mask of friendliness, Keoghan lays out the details and instructions of the curse in a rapid-fire monotone, investing the sheer insanity of the words with a casual straightforwardness that makes them even more chilling and unforgettable.
Played with ice-cold detachment and mercilessness by Keoghan, Martin exhibits zero pity for the suffering of his innocent victims nor does he even react to the pain of his own torture, merely turning his head to spit out a glob of blood after Steven punches him in the face. He's so consumed by his hunger for retribution and resentment toward Steven that he's incapable (or unwilling) of summoning even a scintilla of remorse for the children upon whom he's visiting the sin of their father.
In a fittingly similar fashion to her onscreen better half, Nicole Kidman struggles to maintain a polished, controlled exterior. When the unforgiving hand of fate is brought down on both her children, with no one to turn to for help, Kidman allows herself to break down, but only silently, a red blotch manifesting on her nose as tears drip from her eyelashes down her cheeks. As evinced when Kim curses at her in her hospital bed, Kidman contains her anger within a quietly and sternly authoritative voice as she grips her wrist and snatches her cellphone from her hand. When Steven shoves cinnamon donuts into Bob's mouth in a desperate attempt to disprove Martin's threat, Kidman plays the peacemaking mother, calmly urging Steven to back off and wiping the cinnamon off Bob's lips, but never once raising her voice or pulling him off.
Her most potent display of expressive yet controlled acting occurs in the aforementioned spaghetti scene. As she sits across from Keoghan in his living room, her eyes brim with tears of desperation. She keeps her voice steady as she pleads with Martin to spare her children. When Martin abruptly changes the subject to the manner in which he and his father ate spaghetti, Kidman's left eyebrow raises almost imperceptibly. Her physicality is at once still and passionate. Anna knows that the cherub-like child sitting across from her is the one causing her children to suffer a slow death. Their lives are in the palm of his hand. She's desperate and determined, but refuses to give him the satisfaction of exploding into tears and empty death threats. When Martin calmly excuses himself to get ready for class, Kidman forces a similarly casual and respectful smile across her harrowed face.
By design, the dialogue written by Lanthimos and Filippou is stilted to reflect the former's skewed interpretation of reality. As a result, characters say in detail precisely what they're thinking, often to the point of cringe-making absurdity. In fact, the majority of the absurdist weirdness and humor that course through The Killing of a Sacred Deer's veins spring from the on-the-nose dialogue. At a work celebration, Steven casually volunteers to a colleague that his 14-year-old daughter just started menstruating. Kim volunteers this information herself to Martin during their very first conversation. "I just got my first period," she says, unprovoked. As a nonresponse, Martin asks, "Do you mind if I light a cigarette?" I swear, I thought he was going to ask, "Do you mind if I take a look?" Later, while the two are snuggling in a chair, Martin asks if she's still on her period, despite showing no intention of having sex with her. At a cardiac checkup, Martin asks to see Steven's underarm hair to confirm or disprove Bob's claim that he has "three times more" body hair than he does. Without an ounce of hesitation, Steven nonchalantly unbuttons his shirt and lifts it up to expose his underarm.
At times, the stiffness of the dialogue exposes a lack of warmth between the characters, as evinced when Bob and Kim begin to compete for their father's love in the hope of saving their own lives. "Bob, something terrible happened yesterday," Kim says. "I lost the MP3 player that Martin gave me. I don't know what's wrong with me. I've lost two MP3 players in the last 10 days. So I'd like to ask you a favor. Can I have your MP3 player when you're dead? Please, please, please." Equally as ridiculous is when Kim refers to Bob as her "beloved brother" more than once. It's hard to tell whether the term is meant to be sincere.
At other times, the dialogue is plain boring, such as an early conversation between Steven and Matthew in which they ramble on about their watches (their water resistance and the superiority of a metal strap versus a leather one). And in other places, the dialogue is preposterously amusing: Martin's mother (played in a memorable cameo with a mix of pitiful loneliness and creepy forwardness by Alicia Silverstone) complimenting Steven's "clean and beautiful" hands before kissing them and sucking on his thumb; Kim claiming that Martin made her laugh "so hard [her] ribs hurt" (which, given Martin's humorless and unsettling personality, we know couldn't possibly be true); Steven confessing to Bob that, when he was a child, he snuck into his drunken father's bedroom and gave him a hand job in his sleep for no reason. A confession that offers no insight into Steven's psyche. Was he abused by his father? Is he a repressed homosexual? Lanthimos has no interest in using this confession to deepen Steven's character, but rather to make his audience contort their faces in shocking disgust and say aloud, "What the fuck?" On that front, he certainly succeeds. But there's no depth underlying it. It's just weirdness for the sake of weirdness.
Intentional though they may be, plot holes abound in Lanthimos and Filippou's script: How does Martin acquire the power to paralyze, starve, eye-bleed, and ultimately kill his selected targets? The answer is neither unveiled nor once questioned. The lack of explanation is one thing, the disinterest of the protagonists in pursuing it is another. If Martin's plan from the get-go was to exact revenge on Steven for killing his father, why does he initially crave his attention and affection? It's only after Steven begins to distance himself from Martin that he unleashes his curse. Why would Martin's mother be so desperately and violently attracted to the man who killed her husband? Why would Martin want the man who killed his father to become his step-father? Why does Anna feel no qualms about jerking off her husband's so-called best friend in his car in exchange for classified information on Martin's father? (I get the idea Lanthimos may harbor a fetish for hand jobs.) What makes Kim, after one meeting, fall so madly in love with Martin that she wants to run away with him? How does she learn about his supernatural ability? Wouldn't Anna be willing to sacrifice herself to save her children? Instead, she argues that Steven should kill Kim or Bob because they can have another child. Guess motherhood isn't much of a sacrifice for all mothers.
When the time finally comes for Steven to face up to his fatal mistake and make his impossibly difficult "Sophie's Choice," Lanthimos and Filippou deliver a climax that's both inevitable and unpredictable. Based on Martin's own words and Lanthimos' up-front disinterest in a Hollywood happy ending, there was never even a glimmer of hope that The Killing of a Sacred Deer would end with all four members of the Murphy family being freed from Martin's curse. As long as Martin's father will remain in his grave, a Murphy is predestined to join him. Unable to decide which loved one he can bear to live without, Steven resolves to bind and gag them with duct tape in the living room and place a hood over their heads, while he stands in the middle and, with a beanie pulled over his face, spins around with a rifle before blindly firing a bullet.
Lanthimos builds suspense through the uncertainty of which family member will be shot. He paces this decisive set piece patiently, using two false alarms to generate an air of anticipatory dread. He wants us to hold our breaths as Steven spins around, flinch and gasp at the sound of each bullet, sigh in relief that no one was shot, then prime ourselves for the next attempt. The first two bullets collide with objects. After each shot, Steven uplifts his beanie to survey the damage. At once, he's praying to God that he didn't shoot anyone, and that he did. The sight of Farrell spinning in a circle while wielding a rifle and masked in a beanie is chilling in a way that's almost goofy-looking. Much like how jokes come in threes, so do scares, as the third shot ends in a casualty that claims the life of the youngest Murphy while simultaneously putting a definitive end to the nightmare. The choice to make Bob the sacred deer is a smart one because he was the first to get sick and the closest to death anyway, evinced by his bleeding eyes shortly before his execution. Essentially, his father put him out of his misery. Quietly haunting as the resolution is, the wooden personalities of the characters dull the gut-wrenching impact of the tragedy that befalls them.
6.4/10
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