The New Cult Canon: 'The Killing of a Sacred Deer'

Yorgos Lanthimos' dry black comedy turns a Greek myth about family sacrifice into potent modern allegory.

“Do you understand? It’s metaphorical.” — Barry Keoghan, The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Deep into Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Steven Murphy (Colin Ferrell), a heart surgeon in Cincinnati, finally has to square up to the absurd and terrible choice he’s been deferring throughout most of the film: Which one of his family members should he sacrifice? He could kill his wife, Anna (Nicole Kidman), though as she firmly notes a bit later, she could mitigate the loss of one of their two children by bringing another into the world. That leaves him to consider the other candidates, his 14-year-old daughter Kim (Raffey Cassidy) or his younger son Bob (Sunny Suljic). And so he finds himself in the school office, asking the principal about their academic strengths and weaknesses, and about their general behavior. 

“Do you especially like one more than the other?”

The principal has no answer to that peculiar question and no context for it, either. He certainly does not know that Steven is trying to make him decide which of his kids should be sacrificed, so it’s a small mercy that he doesn’t prefer one over the other. The principal doesn’t seem to care why the father is meeting with him about Kim and Bob—maybe it’s just his way of checking in, to see if there’s more to know about them beyond their report card—and his affable consideration of this absurd question is played, like much of the film, for comedy so dry that David Lean could shoot an epic on it. One point in Kim’s favor: She wrote a very insightful essay about the myth of Iphigenia. 

Little did Kim know that she could be a modern-day Iphigenia. The title and premise of The Killing of a Sacred Deer draws from the Greek tragedy of Agamemnon and the goddess Artemis. The basic story is that Agamemnon, en route to the Trojan War, hunts down one of Artemis’ sacred stags and she responds by preventing the Greek troops from entering Troy until he sacrifices his eldest daughter, Iphigenia. While Iphigenia’s fate varies in different versions, the idea of a father needing to make such a sacrifice is compelling to Lanthimos, who has here made a film about parental toxicity that’s somehow darker and more disturbing than his 2009 breakthrough Dogtooth. They are companion comedies on the corruptions of grown-up power and their effect on the younger generation, but with diverging agendas. 

For one, The Killing of a Sacred Deer doesn’t make it immediately obvious that the parent is the villain of the piece. In the early going, we’re presented with a series of meetings between Steven and Martin Lang (Barry Keoghan), an unsettling 16-year-old who has enough pull over this surgeon to draw him away from the hospital whenever he likes. They exchange banalities at a diner over apple pie and French fries. Steven tells Martin his new haircut looks great, which is self-evidently a lie. He also buys him a nice water-resistant watch, the exact watch worn by Steven’s longtime anesthesiologist (Bill Camp), who gets him a discount. There are discussions about whether a metal or leather strap is best, though that’s a matter of personal preference.

None of this business is going to get Steven out of the bind Martin has put him in. Steven is Agamemnon. Martin is Artemis. The sacred deer is Martin’s father, who died on the operating table, likely due to Steven’s drinking problem at the time. Steven tries to bargain away his responsibility—“A surgeon can never kill a patient,” he argues unconvincingly. “An anesthesiologist can kill a parent.”—but eventually Martin delivers on the threat that he sees as the only “justice” for the negligence that results in his father’s death. All three members of Steven’s family will suffer from a strange paralysis that will be fatal until or unless he kills one of them himself. The film doesn’t care about how Martin is able to pull this off—top medical experts have no answers—but he makes good on his promise. Bob’s body goes numb first. Then Lisa’s. The ball is in Steven’s court. 

Or is it? 

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a hilarious film where every single laugh sticks hard in the throat. The dialogue is too clever to be written by AI, but it sounds like it was written for AI, in that it feels like a buggy simulation of the way people actually talk. When the Murphys have a dinner conversation that turns to Bob’s long hair, which Steven wants cut, Anna tries to defuse the situation by offering a Stepford reassurance to her husband and the whole table: “You have lovely hair, too. We all have lovely hair.” Private matters are raised casually, like when Steven informs his anesthesiologist that “Our daughter started menstruating last week.” And when a discussion between Lisa and Martin swings around to armpit hair, Martin later asks Steven to prove Lisa’s claim that her dad has “three times more” hair than he does. 

Lanthimos stages the action for maximum discomfort, somewhere between the formal chilliness of Stanley Kubrick and the sinister provocation of Lars Von Trier. The hospital where Steven works and the paralyzed children are eventually taken have vast hallways that Lanthimos covers in immense tracking shots that recall the Overlook Hotel, but with an imposing sterility that stands in for Kubrick’s disorienting, ghostly vibes. In place of a conventional score, Lanthimos plants classical samples from the Soviet-Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina like harsh stingers on the soundtrack, to keep the audience perpetually off-balance. Even by Lanthimos’ standards, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is an audaciously off-putting piece of work, which seems appropriate to the moral dilemma at its center. 

We live in a world where surgical negligence like Steven’s would be handled internally, through malpractice insurance and perhaps the writing of a very large check. And even in the world of The Killing of a Sacred Deer, it is Steven’s expectation that he will not be held accountable for actions that left Martin without a father (and with a very broken mother, played in an inspired bit of casting by Alicia Silverstone). Though he has stopped drinking, Steven never reflects for a moment on his own culpability. He’s only concerned with keeping the well-appointed life that he has, with the beautiful house and the esteemed job and the family with lovely hair. Martin’s eye-for-an-eye morality may come across as psychotic, especially the professionally unnerving Barry Keoghan is playing him, but he’s at least holding Steven’s feet to the fire. 

The Killing of a Sacred Deer culminates in an astounding dodge, as Steven devises one final way to avoid responsibility for his actions. He has already tried to mollify Martin with gifts. He has introduced him to his family, to put human faces on the people who are potentially marked for death. He has tried to blame his anesthesiologist. He has denied that his paralyzed children could actually die. (He tries at one point to get Bob to walk by hoisting him out of his wheelchair and onto the floor, but the kid flops repeatedly.) He has appealed to the school principal to pick the best child. None of those options are spared him from having to make this terrible sacrifice, lest his entire family die instead of just one. 

Now, with Bob bleeding out of his eyes, a sign that he’s about to die, Steven binds, gags and blindfolds all three of his family members with duct tape and pillowcases, arranges them in a rough triangle around the living room, and pulls a black winter hat over his eyes. Like a fatal game of “pin the tail on the donkey,” he spins around in circles with a rifle, takes a random shot and sees if he’s hit anyone. He finally does the third time and the deed is done. It is a wonderfully perverse and ironic conclusion, paying the mortal debt he owes to Martin while shielding himself from responsibility to the very end. Martin will still be the bad guy who terrorized his family, but he will stay in his house, stay in his job and perhaps have another child one day, as his wife had suggested. He has lost something but learned nothing.

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