In the Flesh: The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Lanthimos’s whole thing, the magical realist worlds of flat affects and disorienting angles he assembles so meticulously in his films, is strong medicine by any measure. The Killing of a Sacred Deer pushes even deeper than its immediate predecessor, The Lobster, into the director’s peculiar sensibilities, a choice resulting in a movie at once richer and more off-putting than his other work. Where The Lobster focuses on the colossal social stakes of minute interpersonal processes, The Killing of a Sacred Deer adopts a narrower scope, dwelling at length on the bifurcated desires and responsibilities of a man of stature in his field and community. As Dr. Steven Murphy, Colin Farrell is the sort of man who doesn’t need to work to evade consequences. If his drunken negligence killed a patient on the operating table — something to which he never explicitly admits — then he needs only shake his head and say that sometimes patients die. In his tasteful, modern home with its solarium and study, surrounded by his charming and attractive family, supported by the full might of the medical establishment and the godlike authority with which many surgeons are endowed, he is untouchable, the matter of his conscience left entirely to his own discretion.

What, then, are we to make of Martin (Barry Keoghan), the dead man’s troubled son, and the strange curse he inflicts on the Murphy household? Unless Steven kills one of his family members, Martin tells him after Steven’s son inexplicably loses the use of his legs, all three will sicken and die. The story parallels the legend of the Greek general Agammemnon, whose accidental slaying of a sacred deer necessitated he murder his daughter Iphegenia as recompense to the goddess Artemis, and its coldly uncomfortable fairytale tone suits the subject matter perfectly. Many scenes set in Steven’s hospital are shot from a perspective several feet above eye level, as though some divine entity dogs his steps, looming over him in dreadful silence as he scurries through his halls of power in a vain attempt to forestall the fate Martin has ordained for him. In short, the film’s conceit is that the bloody higher justice of the gods is real and pays no heed to rank or standing. There is a flat, cold simplicity to it which compels introspection, which does not permit retreat from the reality that in our world consequences exist only for the weak.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer has much to recommend it beyond its haunting premise. Its first moments depict an open-heart surgery, the organ beating in full view as surgeons’ hands flutter and stitch and prod around it and choral music swells to an awe-inspiring crescendo. As Steven’s daughter, Kim, Raffey Cassidy is equal parts intense and venal, her small mouth and large, bright eyes communicating with terrible passion the lengths she’ll go to in order to survive her family’s ordeal. The anaesthesiophilic sex scene between Steven and his wife Anna (Nicole Kidman), Martin’s mother (Alicia Silverstone) fawning over Steven’s beautiful hands and then sucking and gnawing at them like a vampire, Keoghan’s cherubic, effeminate beauty — the film’s every element is assembled with meticulous and fascinating care, a rare disease squirming in a blood sample under a microscope, silent and minuscule but no less interesting for it.