The Killing of a Sacred Deer

It takes a Greek director — Yorgos Lanthimos — to revive the elemental power of Greek tragedy in a modern setting. 

Because this is such a primal story it could be the most powerful and disturbing film of the year. The characters speak in a kind of affectless tone, usually on banal matters (like how waterproof a watch is). The music alternates eerie silences with harsh nerve-wracking strings and drums. Shots of surgery and blood churn the stomach. The widescreen settings have an amphitheatrical stretch. Alone among recent films, it sends you out in catharsis — “calm of mind, all passion spent.” It finally releases you, drained. 

A man’s misdeed brings down a curse upon his entire house that only his own immense sacrifice can expiate. That’s the essence of Greek tragedy, beside which our mundane stories of simple guilt, rationalization, mercy, forgiveness, and even human justice — the business of cops and courts — dwindle into insignificance. This is man powerless against the gods. 

This primitive drama involves a heart surgeon Steven Murphy and his ophthalmologist wife Anna. That is, the elemental force erupts in the seat of modern science, rationalism, humanity. Specifically, it's the sciences of feeling and vision. When the dpctor fails in his basic mission “to do no harm,” the professional curers are themselves profoundly afflicted. Their reason is helpless, irrelevant, once the old pagan gods have been stirred to ire. Hence, too, the absence of police here and the human justice system.

Dr Murphy was at least tipsy when his bungled surgery cost a man’s life. Murphy has not openly accepted responsibility or expressed his guilt. But he did attend the man’s funeral and stop drinking altogether. He also befriended the man’s orphaned son Martin, for whom he buys gifts and offers friendship as a sop to confronting his own guilt on any deeper level. 

Now Martin swells from orphaned son into preternatural agent of justice. For his father’s death has proved a curse on his house too. He and his mother — in different ways — crave Dr Murphy as a replacement for the dead man in their lives: “My mom's attracted to you. She's got a great body.” As an emblem of a repeated life pattern, the "favourite film" they're watching on TV is Groundhog Day.

This apparently thuggish kid reveals an other-worldly understanding. He has become the seer, the oracle who alone fathoms the root cause of the Murphy curse and its resolution. If Murphy doesn’t kill one of his children, his entire family will die. First they are paralyzed, deprived of appetite and will, then their eyes erupt in Oedipusian bleed, then they die. 

Of course these modern sophisticates deny this savage myth. Murphy in particular blames Martin for the curse he has only reported. Daughter Kim understands, because she wrote a paper on Iphygenia, Agamemnon’s daughter whom he has to sacrifice to atone for having killed a sacred deer. 

Kim is attracted to Martin and offers herself to him. In him she senses a worldliness — whether sexual or Classical Greek — apart from the others. Having initially assumed kid brother Bob would go (“Can I have your MP3 when you die?) she then volunteers to be Dr Murphy’s sacrifice. She knows the story.

The Murphys’ life is characterized by a kind of torpor. No-one has any zest for anything. The conversations are banal and wary. They worry about motorcycle helmets not their profound human fate.  Murphy and then Kim report her first period as if it were a head cold. All sense of the primeval has been lost. Anna feigns total anesthesia for her sex with her husband. He needs his delusion of a doctor's power, even there. His friend and anesthesiologist charges Anna a hand job for info. 

Facing the curse Steven tries coaxing, coercion, threats, even physical violence and the threat of murder, to shake the seer off his vision. Clinically, Steven turns to a school counsellor for advice on which child to pick. Anna sees his refusal to understand their predicament: “Our children are dying, but yes. I can make you mashed potatoes.” She marshals the will to free Martin from her husband’s futile abuse. 

In this moral vacuum both the doctor and the anesthesiologist blame the other for any failures in the operating room. This is the modern world with advanced science and culture but with stupefied emotions and a shallow sense of responsibility. Dr Murphy forbids smoking in the house, but his wife and daughter smoke outside. Martin accepts his recent addiction with the same resignation he seems to have accepted his role of messenger from the gods, to bring Murphy to their harsh justice.  
     This elemental tragedy is the prophet director’s harsh judgment on a world that evades its guilt and responsibility by suspending all conscience, all sense of a higher purpose than the mundane and worldly. The modern news cycle allows no time for the eternal.