Killing a Sacred Deer Ending Explanation: An Impossible Choice

The films of the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos are not for everyone. They’re aggressively uncomfortable, poking and prodding audiences with all kinds of shocking content and even more shocking ways of delivering it, but there’s a lot to love about his fascinating filmography. Whether he’s working from a script he developed with frequent collaborator Efthymis Philipou or a script penned by The Great creator Tony McNamara, Lanthimos manages to inject his unique vision into his films, using characters that seem completely inhuman to make the audience reflect on their own. humanity. This can lead to his films being a bit confusing, including his 2017 thriller The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

The Killing of a Deer stars Colin Farrell as heart surgeon Stephen Murphy, who develops a strange relationship with 16-year-old Martin Lang (Barry Kegan), whose father died on Stephen’s operating table. Martin begins to fit in with the Murphy family, especially bonding with Stephen’s teenage daughter Kim (Raife Cassidy) and even younger son Bob (Sonny Sulzyk), before revealing his true intentions to the family: he’s going to force Stephen to choose a family member sacrifice or his wife and children will die of a slow, horrible disease. For now our review found the film too darkthere’s also plenty of black absurdist humor from Lanthimos and Philip, which makes The Killing of a Stag one of the best directors.

Let’s delve into this twisted little film and answer some of its most important questions – starting with why everyone is talking and acting so weird.

While some unusual dialogue choices in Lanthimos’ films with McNamara, “Poor” and “Favorite’ can be attributed to different time periodsThe Killing of a Sacred Deer feels contemporary and takes place in our world or a world very similar to it. However, everyone talks strangely, stilted, and says things to each other that seem completely inappropriate. For example, Stephen tells a colleague that his daughter has started her period with the same casual attitude you might have when telling someone about a new recipe or a football game, and the colleague doesn’t look phased at all.

The finality of this varies from film to film, but this kind of distanced, impersonal play is a Lanthimos trademark (along with amazing dance sceneswhich “Holy Deers” unfortunately do not have). When his characters eventually show moments of genuine vulnerability and emotion, it tends to feel more impactful because they otherwise seem so detached from their feelings. What’s great is that it can work for a variety of effects, from pure horror to bits of dark comedy that help break up dark narratives. The whole point is to cause the viewer to be horrified or to laugh, or sometimes both. In the case of The Killing of a Sacred Deer, the story is based on a classic tragedy, and the unusual acting style and dialogue also help make it more like a stage play, adding another layer of artificiality.

While Lanthymas and Philip’s script for The Killing of the Sacred Deer is a completely original story, it is inspired by the ancient Greek tragedy of Iphigenia, the daughter of the Mycenaean king Agamemnon (you know boyfriend Brian Cox played at Troy). In the classical tragedian Euripides’ version of the myth, Iphigenia in Aulis, Agamemnon offends the goddess of the hunt, Artemis, when he kills a deer in her sacred forest while preparing his forces to invade Troy. The goddess stops the winds needed by the soldiers to set sail and prevents them from leaving until the king makes things right by sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia. When she is sacrificed, the beautiful young woman is transformed into a doe, and it is believed that Artemis took Iphigenia to live among the gods.

In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Martin takes on the role of the goddess Artemis, while Stephen takes on the role of Agamemnon. However, instead of simply forcing Stephen to sacrifice his daughter, Martin tortures Stephen with a sort of “Sophie’s Choice,” forcing him to choose which of his family members he wants to kill. However, there is some time limit as Martin has somehow cursed or poisoned the children who lose the ability to walk and soon lose the desire to eat. If their eyes begin to bleed, he tells them they will be close to death. If Stephen can’t make his choice, Martin will make it for him this way. But how does he do it?

Keoghan plays Martin as a kind of mischievous imp: an absolute teenage gremlin who clearly derives pleasure from the discomfort he causes Stephen, which may even go beyond his need for revenge – but is he a supernatural being? He stands in for the goddess Artemis of myth, and it certainly seems like he can make the Murphy children sick without having any precise methods. He also shows his control when he briefly allows Kim to walk again, simply by instructing her to do so during a phone conversation.

Since The Killing of a Sacred Deer is more of a parable than a realistic depiction of life, some things are simply left unexplained. It’s entirely possible that Martin poisoned the kids while he was getting close to each of them, since he does spend time alone with each, or that he continues to drug them through some method (maybe the cigarettes that Kim got hooked on? ). It’s also entirely possible that he’s actually some kind of inhuman, supernatural being capable of truly putting a curse on the Murphy family. Maybe that’s why he can’t eat spaghetti properly.

As with Lanthimos and Philippe’s other collaborations, The Lobster, the “how” behind everything that happens isn’t really the point. We’ll never know exactly how people are turned into animals when they can’t find love in The Lobster and we will never know how Martin manages to inflict his curse. More importantly, Stephen was the one who doomed them through his failure to take responsibility for himself and his actions.

In the end, Stephen cannot choose between killing one of his children or his wife, who orders him to kill one of the children because she may still have another. (Ouch.) He even goes to his kids’ school and asks the principal who is objectively the better kid, only to find out that they’re both a little restless, and Kim did a great report on Iphigenia in Aulis. We’ll never know for sure how much Stephen is really to blame for Martin’s father’s death, although it’s clear that he’s not always the most responsible surgeon. In fact, there are hints that Stephen is either a necrophile or molests his unconscious patients, as he requires his wife to lie still in a T-position during sex, which his daughter later imitates in an attempt to seduce Martin.

Potentially unfathomable fetish aside, Steven’s crime is that he can’t pick a victim to the point where Bob’s eyes begin to bleed. a truly terrifying scene which highlights how much the children are suffering because of Steven’s inability to make up his mind. In classical tragedies, a tragic hero must have a certain flaw, and in The Killing of a Stag, Stephen’s great flaw is that he cannot take responsibility, which leads him to be indecisive.

Eventually he places his family around him, closes his eyes, and spins in a circle with a loaded gun, firing when he stops. He kills Bob, fulfilling the rules of sacrifice and saving Kim and Anna (who never shows signs of illness, but Martin promises she will). Stephen couldn’t even take responsibility for choosing who to sacrifice and instead left it up to chance.

After Stephen kills poor little Bob, we see a final scene at the diner where Stephen and Martin met before Stephen introduced Martin to his family. The rest of the Murphy family are sitting together in Stephen and Martin’s old place. The family has never been particularly expressive or warm, but it’s clear that they’ve cooled even more since Bob’s death. It’s easy to imagine the bitterness that could have arisen because Stephen not only couldn’t choose between them, but put them in the situation in the first place.

Martin is also at the diner, watching them from the bar. The family gets up and leaves, leaving Martin behind. Their ordeal, as far as his involvement is concerned, is over and now everyone can theoretically move on with their lives. Their complete lack of revenge against him alludes to the original text and his role as the human incarnation of the true goddess, though this could also be another case of Stephen not taking action. On that note, the film ends, offering more questions than answers, which, to be honest, is kind of the whole Lanthimos thing. A must for more tragic and darkly comedic parables watch his latest film Kinds of Kindness which is essentially a “Twilight Zone” for perverts. It’s a guaranteed feel-good experience.