While I was on my weekly scouring of the interwebs for recognisably obscure (and hopefully traumatising) films, I came across a list of must-watches. The first fifty films were disappointingly blockbusters, but the latter half included the striking and unfamiliar title: The Killing of a Sacred Deer. The blurb associated was withholding to what lies beyond, but I was in a mood for adventure; little did I know what I was in for. These are some of my thoughts and post-catharsis reflections on the dramatic mastery of this film, particularly in its treatment of familial relationships, both surrogate and genetic. (Spoilers galore)
The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a 2017 psychological horror by the inimitable Yorgos Lanthimos in which a saintly surgeon is stalked upon by a demonic boy. Ambiguity in both the cause of crises and its consequences pervades the film with a vague sense of terror, as if the overarching power of fate is too terrible for us to comprehend or predict. To hammer in the unpredictability of fate, the film tells us exactly what tragedy the characters will befall, but the uncertainty lies in the timing. Lanthimos plays liberally with timing of the dramatic events. We know exactly what will happen, and when it does, it hits with a sense of tragic doom—sans surprise—with which we are prompted to anticipate the next crisis.
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The opening of the film has the audience looking unblinkingly at a pumping heart grotesquely held exposed by metal clamps, affording us the view of a heart surgeon (Steven) who has the godly power over life and death, an effect emphasised by the flourish of choral music over every minute detail of the ritual of subverting death. The religiosity of the opening scene makes the subsequent non-musical tracking through the hallway all the more jarring, as the surgeon blandly question his anaesthesiologist about his watch. And the stouter man responds blandly back. The two men sound like they are speaking within quotations. I immediately distrusted Steven over his attempts to one-up his companion on the water-resistance and expense of his watch. Though Steven’s life seems meticulously, neatly managed, there is something spiritually off about the man; he seems to be lugging around some burden from his past. I’ve been told that the patent off-ness is a trademark of Lanthimos, and he uses it brilliantly for a full-throated horror that this film is panning out to be.
Steven meets with a young man (Martin) at a restaurant and gently talks to him in the apologetic way that only guilty men and cheating men can. An unknown amount of time passes and the two are walking by the shore; Steven offers the young man money. Martin flirtatiously offer his company. The implication seems clear but for the vulnerable way the young man behaves; he seems unburdened by the unnatural relationship between him and Steven. So my hasty assumption proves to be incorrect, as it is revealed that Steven’s guilt is of the life-death nature rather than of the sexually illicit. It is revealed that Steven is a recovering alcoholic, and Martin’s father died under his scalpel. Steven tries and fails to become the surrogate father of Martin through the gifting of expensive items to buy his atonement.
The unconscious current in the opening is perverse as both Martin and his mother attempt to extort sex from Steven as a means of gaining perverse power through manipulating Steven’s guilt. This is reminiscent of pagan sex rituals to acquire supernatural power (The Great Rite), its purpose of course forbidden to and hidden from the godly surgeon. Steven’s desperate atonement escalates when he has dinner with Martin and his mother, who lays out a sexual proposition. Steven refuses Martin’s repeated requests for his company after the attempted seduction, which sets off the unravelling of his tragic fate. The film continues in a horror show as Martin seems to curse the family to avenge the death of his father. Martin unsettlingly proclaims, in no uncertain terms, that Steven must take the life of a family member in compensation for killing his father. He must commit filicide before they successively paralyse below the waist, refuse food, bleed from the eyes, and finally die. Bob, his son, is the first to collapse, which complicates the already strained father-son relationship. I.E. Steven repeatedly tells Bob to cut off his long hair (a phallic symbol in classic psychoanalysis), and Bob rebels against his authority. If we follow through with the Oedipal analogy, this is an attempted suppression of Bob’s growth into a man who will replace his father and claim his mother as a sexual object.
Familial tension becomes apparent after advanced medical screenings prove inconclusive to clinically diagnose Bob. Fear makes Steven an ugly creature. In order to make Bob stand (and therefore prove his paralysis psychosomatic), he picks him up and repeatedly drops him on the floor. Physical aggression extends to the mental when Steven “opens up” by telling Bob about his sexual awakening in exchange for Bob’s “secret” of pretending to be ill. The act is emotionally extortionary. Bob silently cries at the mutilation of his dignity in ill-health through the distrust of his father.
The Oedipal analysis does not explain the prominent and peculiar role women play in the film. For a conceptualisation of the girls, we turn from Greek theatre to Greek mythology: the myth of Iphigenia. The title of the film is an allusion to Agamemnon killing Artemis’s sacred stag, and therefore must sacrifice his daughter to atone for his offence, and as an offering to the goddess in order to win the Trojan War. The story is loosely based on the myth, but it makes the analogy clear: Martin is established as superhuman (cannot be understood to have intentions of mortals, possibly evil), and Steven as Agamemnon must kill again as punishment for his sin. So, we introduce Kim, daughter of Steven.
Kim offers herself to Martin with her newfound pubescent sexuality. It is unclear whether the relationship was consummated, but the power of her emerging sex promotes Kim to rebel against her controlling mother. After a motorcycle outing with Martin, Kim forwardly asks her mother, who was watering the lawn, if she had been tired lately. Anna is surprised that her daughter is aware of her ageing and deteriorating health. It is later revealed that Anna has lost all of her body hair and is sometimes is rendered immobile in her bed—she’s without sexual agency or capability. Anna, throughout the film, remains emotionally collected and healthy, which makes me suspect that she was in no danger of the curse befalling her because of her ailing sexuality. Martin also seems to only take interest in the children and remains courteous to Anna as matriarch. The young, ripe, burgeoning ones would be the more tragic to lose to a senseless curse, so perhaps it was a dramatic device on the part of Lanthimos as well. Kim was the next to collapse, and Steven’s attitude noticeably shifts to gentle urgings for her to get better as the threat of the curse reifies itself.
The ending of the film brings down several pennies in the air: what Steven is going to do, whether he will let his children succumb to the curse before taking action, and what will befall Martin as consequence. The dramatic tension in the final leg of the film is masterful, and I would do it no justice with a retelling, I urge you to watch the film, if only for the ending. So here’s a quick summary:
Steven abducts Martin and keeps him in a nauseatingly Van Gogh basement
Martin viscerally demonstrates the rules of retribution by biting off a chunk of his own flesh.
Martin manipulates Steven to let him go through psychological intimidation
Bob starts to bleed from the eyes
Steven plays spin-the-bottle with his family—supposedly blameless way to determine who dies, and
Bob dies after two missed shots, rather unsurprisingly.
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There are a series of familial tensions in the film that makes this film classic Greek, employing subtly perversions in the relationships between the patriarch and his subjects. The sexuality of the film is perverse and unbalanced—unsettling in its subtle coercion and power relations. These imbalances are the more obvious between family members.
Steven’s relationships to members of his family are as follows:
Anna
Returning to the opening: Steven has sex with his knowing, slyly seductive wife who pretends to be under “general anaesthetics” (limp, unresponsive, corpse-like) during the act. The proximity of the scene to the medical opening strongly implicates Steven’s disturbing character of sexualising medical submission to his machinations—apparently a god-complex. However, Steven’s God complex was unable to protect him against the otherworldly Martin.
Kim
At a formal function, Steven offhandedly declares that his daughter (Kim) has started menstrating before leaving the occasion—she is now ripe for the picking. Kim then sings for Martin while leaning against the base of a tree, reminiscent of a family tree and the potentiality that she will be a matriarch of a thriving lineage; she is a reproductive spawn. Perhaps her sexual maturity is the reason she survived the arbitrary killing at the end of the film, which constitutes the most drastic departure from the myth of Iphigenia.
Bob
Bob plays an important thematic role by being entrenched in the father’s struggle against guilt. Steven pressures Bob to cut his long hair, which symbolises castration, of taking away the usurping power of the son. Steven threatens to shave off Bob’s hair and make him eat it if he doesn’t spontaneously become healthy. Which if you imagine in the terms of the phallic analogy, is very unsettling. Steven tells Bob in the hospital hallway the story of his sexual becoming: he stroked his drunk father’s penis until he ejaculated. He had just begun to masturbate, and was fearful of his father’s amount of semen compared to his own; nevertheless, he blindly usurped his father in a moment of paralysed vulnerability, an ignorant symbolic castration of the father. Steven’s domination of his father reflects down the lineage to his compulsion to dominate his son. This is a multi-generational Oedipal struggle. Steven takes precaution against his own demise at the hands of his son by attempting to symbolically castrate Bob. At the end of the film, Bob crawls through the house to show his father that he has cut off his own hair as a final plea to spare his life. Here we see the unsustainability of Oedipal analogy beyond one generation: Bob fails to usurp his father, and the struggle must be terminated to calm the savage paranoia of the patriarch. Steven is also defeated in having to kill his own son, thus discontinuing the genetic burden of his guilt.
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After that thematic analysis, I will briefly zoom out to the aesthetic/structural idiosyncrasies of the film. The first thing to take note is the style of the cinematography, which is integral to the tonal theme of the whole film. Lanthimos uses long, moving shots in moments of anticipation that refuses the audience a sense of peace, and he often does not resolve the tension, which is carried onto the next scene. Lanthimos’s choice of a moving camera puts the characters in perpetual suspension. The result is a pace that is strikingly that of an afternoon walk, persistent and secure while being catalytic to the anxiety levels of the audience. The moving shots are by an unsteady hand-held cameras at the end of the film, when the tension was the highest, contributing to the whole off-kilter feel. This heightened anxiety is resolved at the killing of Bob. A dizzying car ride has come to a stop, and I’m left with only relief and nausea.
So yeah. If ever you’re in the mood for some casual cinematic trauma.
Amazing review. Love your analysis and writing style.
Woahh great review excited to watch the film