The Killing of a Sacred Deer: An Unfulfilled Ultimatum
We start where any good Yorgos Lanthimos film inevitably does: provocation. As The Killing of a Sacred Deer opens, we are treated to an orchestral score over a static shot of blood and literal guts. We can see that this is a surgical environment, but the shot is held closely enough that it’s difficult to discern exactly what we’re looking at. Harder still to discern why.
Contextually it’s given that Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell) is a surgeon, so this shot would comprise a familiar sight for him. But we don’t see or hear Steven at work, nor is the scenario alluded to later in the film. So the shot is to set the atmosphere, then; except, it’d be hard to identify a mood assisted or ushered in by the shot. We’re left with a merely cheeky provocation on the part of Lanthimos—a move that he’s increasingly prone to, despite demonstrating pointed imagery in his earlier career.
Despite the harbinger of the opening shot, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is not entirely void of insight or purpose. It represents Lanthimos at the edge of the abyss, with one foot grounded in the excoriation of societal relationships, and one foot dangling in an empty mist.
Beyond work and his nuclear family, we see Steven interacting with a young man named Martin (Barry Keoghan), though the terms of their relationship are hazy. It doesn’t seem like a mentorship (though that’s how Steven passes it off to his coworker) and it doesn’t appear intimate. Still, their relationship seems forced, maybe illicit—though, in Lanthimos’ worlds, perhaps all of our relationships are forced. We gradually understand the dynamic: Martin’s father died in a surgery while under Steven’s (perhaps inebriated) care.
It’s unclear how much responsibility Steven bears for Martin’s father’s death. It even seems unclear to Steven, though there’s a definite sense of guilt that weighs him down, motivating him to buy Martin lavish gifts and insert himself into Martin’s life. Eventually that means introducing Martin to his family: Anna (Nicole Kidman), his wife; his teenage daughter, Kim (Raffey Cassidy); and the youngest child, Bob (Sonny Suljic). The invitation is a bad move on Steven’s part, laden with foreboding, that soon culminates in an ultimatum from Martin: Since his father died at Steven’s hands, one of Steven’s family must also die. The kicker is that Steven can choose who that sole person should be. If he refuses the choice, then his family will slowly die one by one until they’re all gone. First they will lose the use of their legs, then they will stop eating, then their eyes will bleed, before finally death arrives.
The film rings out as Lanthimos’ rendition of Funny Games, but the comparison to Michael Haneke’s corrosive staging of a home invasion does The Killing of a Sacred Deer no favors. There are more curious, more interesting echoes with Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel and Pasolini’s Teorema. Considering these as predecessors highlights the odd allure and power that Martin has. The film depicts the possibility of a person as a poisonous idea. Martin is an infection that carries through this family, invading the desires and fears of each member.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer continues painstakingly, watching how this put-together family responds to this intimate trolley problem. Martin’s threat would seem to imply some form of poison or other medically induced concern, but every test at their disposal fails to diagnose their children. As time goes on, of course, everyone becomes more desperate, revealing the heat of Lanthimos’ film through the constant, uncommented transgression of social boundaries. It’s as surprising and funny as it is bleak, and this is where Lanthimos has shined in films such as Dogtooth and The Lobster.
Stylistically, The Killing of a Sacred Deer shares much with those films, picking up the clipped, deadpan dialogue of The Lobster. Here, however, the staid style is interrupted by Keoghan’s tics of speech, the needless repetition and pace of Martin’s words. It’s a tremendous performance (and clearly isn’t the last time Keoghan would play the role of an infiltrator), typified in the moment when Martin makes his decree marking “that critical moment we both knew would come.” Keoghan wonderfully underplays the moment, rushing through the line as if Martin is desperate to get it off his chest.
It truly is the critical moment, but there’s a mystery to that declaration that they both knew it would come. Is this event the endpoint of Steven’s choices, not in the fact of his guilt (the killing) but in the performance of it? By deflecting his guilt while refusing to let Martin out of his orbit, does he bring these tragic events about as much as Martin does? It’s a fascinating question that doesn’t get thoroughly explored.
Steven continually refuses responsibility, but it’s also not clear what choices are even really available to him at this point. (Comically, he attempts to outsource his decision to his children’s school principal.) Just as Steven is a bit of a dud, so is the way the film carries its events forward. The search for Kim late in the film is the most effective scene in its cold, jarring paranoiac style. This, briefly, is evocative of Glazer’s honed moods, but The Killing of a Sacred Deer can’t sustain it.
The dialectic between Steven and Martin is analogous to the film itself. Martin pushes forward with a transformative action that opens up new paths, which is just what the story and dialogue do, offering facets of social critique, moral perplexity, and refined characterizations. But just as Steven aimlessly avoids making any choice, so, too, does the film seem timid about following any of those paths. Instead, the concluding moments of the film are its blandest. Where parts of the film show the incision of earlier Lanthimos, this is a signpost for what would come later—the provocative vacuity, the empty vessel stylized as satire but without substance. There’s still substance and tragedy to The Killing of a Sacred Deer, but it arrives unfinished. Perhaps there’s even a fear of what the act of finishing, of following through on the ultimatum, would mean.
