Yorgos Lanthimos Turns a Greek Myth Into a Revenge Story Without a Hero

Yorgos Lanthimos opens The Killing of a Sacred Deer with a beating heart, cut open on an operating table, and never quite lets the audience forget the sound. The 2017 film stars Colin Farrell as Steven Murphy, a cardiothoracic surgeon in Cincinnati whose household runs on a cold, precise routine. That routine breaks when a teenage boy named Martin Lang, played by Barry Keoghan, starts turning up at the edges of Steven’s life.

The film premiered at the 70th Cannes Film Festival on 22 May 2017, where it won Best Screenplay. Curzon released it in Ireland and the United Kingdom on 3 November 2017. It grossed $10.7 million worldwide and drew positive reviews, with praise aimed at Lanthimos’ direction, the screenplay, the cinematography and the cast.

Trailer, via A24.

A Surgeon, a Diner, and a Fatherless Teen

Steven meets Martin at a diner after performing open heart surgery. Martin is 16. His father died a few years earlier. Steven invites him home to meet Anna, played by Nicole Kidman, and the couple’s children, Kim and Bob.

Martin makes a good impression on the family. He gets along especially well with Kim, played by Raffey Cassidy. Steven then goes to Martin’s house for dinner at Martin’s request. After Martin goes to bed, Martin’s mother, played by Alicia Silverstone, initiates sex with Steven. He rejects her. She tells him it is Martin’s wish for them to have sex. Steven leaves angry.

The scene is the film’s first real fracture. Up to that point, the Murphys’ world looks orderly and clean. Martin’s mother turns that order into something obscene, and Steven walks out without a way to explain what just happened to his wife.

Martin’s Demands Grow

Martin visits Steven’s office complaining of chest pain. Steven runs tests. Every result comes back normal. Martin invites Steven over again. Steven declines.

The requests for attention keep coming, more frequent and more desperate. Steven grows frustrated and concerned. He learns that Martin gave Kim a ride home on his motorcycle.

Then one morning Bob, played by Sunny Suljic, cannot move his legs. Steven and Anna rush him to the hospital. Doctors run numerous tests.

Martin reveals the connection: his father died while Steven was operating on him. Martin blames Steven. To make things even, he says, Steven must kill a member of his own family. If Steven refuses, all four will die within a few days, beginning with paralysis, then an inability to eat, then bleeding from the eyes. Steven has Martin ejected from the hospital.

The Body Keeps the Score

What follows is the part that makes The Killing of a Sacred Deer more than a thriller about a strange boy. Bob starts refusing to eat. Steven forces him, furiously, and it does not work. Kim, who has fallen in love with Martin, collapses while singing in her school’s choir and is hospitalized.

The film’s horror is not in gore. It is in a household where a father is told to choose which of his children dies, and the choice is treated as a logistical problem. Lanthimos and co-writer Efthimis Filippou wrote the screenplay together. The dialogue stays flat and formal even as the family falls apart, which makes the violence feel closer to a medical case than a melodrama.

Farrell, Kidman, and Keoghan

Farrell plays Steven as a man who has spent his life fixing bodies and has no language for a problem he cannot operate on. Kidman’s Anna is quieter and, in her way, more frightening. Keoghan’s Martin is the film’s engine. He is polite, blank and relentless, and the performance is the reason the premise holds.

The supporting cast includes Bill Camp as Matthew Williams, Raffey Cassidy as Kim, Sunny Suljic as Bob, and Alicia Silverstone as Martin’s mother. Herb Caillouet plays Ed Thompson, the hospital director. Barry G. Bernson appears as Dr. Larry Banks. Denise Dal Vera plays Mary Williams.

The awards run matched the reviews. At the 15th Irish Film & Television Awards, the film earned four nominations, and Keoghan won Best Supporting Actor. It was nominated for Best Director, Best Screenwriter and Best Actor for Farrell at the 30th European Film Awards. The 33rd Independent Spirit Awards nominated Keoghan for Best Supporting Male and the film for Best Cinematography.

What the Film Is Actually About

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a revenge story that refuses to explain its own rules. Martin’s curse has no origin, no cure and no negotiation. Steven, a man who presides over a spotless household, is asked to trade one life for three. The film never lets him off that hook.

The title points to the older story underneath: a sacrifice demanded, a father forced to choose. Lanthimos does not update that story so much as drain it of comfort. There is no god here, only a teenage boy who says the rules and is believed.

The weakness is the same as the strength. The flat affect that makes the horror land also keeps the audience at a distance. Some viewers will find the film cold to the point of numbness. The ending, when Steven finally acts, is staged with the same clinical calm as the opening surgery.

That is the point, and it is also the limit. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a precise, controlled film about a man who cannot control anything. It is not warm, and it does not want to be. What it wants is to make you watch a family come apart while everyone keeps their manners.

The comparison worth making is with Lanthimos’ earlier work. The Killing of a Sacred Deer takes the absurdist register of his Greek films and drops it into an American suburb, with a movie star in the lead. The transplant works. Farrell and Kidman give the film a weight that a lesser cast could not carry, and Keoghan gives it a threat that never raises its voice.

At 121 minutes, the film earns its runtime. It does not pad. Every scene moves the family closer to the choice, and the choice is the whole movie.

This is a film that trusts its audience to sit with discomfort and not look away. It rewards that trust with one of the more unsettling endings of its year, and it asks nothing in return except patience. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is not for everyone. It is, however, exactly the film it sets out to be.

Barry Keoghan · Colin Farrell · movie review · Nicole Kidman · The Killing of a Sacred Deer · Yorgos Lanthimos