The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Plot

After performing an open heart surgery, Steven Murphy, a cardiothoracic surgeon in Cincinnati, goes to a diner where he meets 16-year-old Martin Lang, whose father died a few years earlier. Steven invites Martin to meet his family - comprising his wife Anna, their daughter Kim, and their son Bob. Martin makes a good impression on everyone, but seems to especially get along with Kim.

The following night, Steven goes to Martin's house for dinner at Martin's request. After Martin goes to bed, Martin's mother initiates sex with Steven; when he rejects her, she tells him that it is Martin's wish for them to have sex, after which Steven angrily leaves.

Martin visits Steven's office, complaining of chest pain. Steven runs tests on Martin, all of which produce normal results. Martin invites Steven over again, but Steven declines. Martin's demands for Steven's attention grow increasingly frequent and desperate, and Steven becomes gradually more frustrated and concerned, especially when he learns that Martin gave Kim a ride home on his motorcycle.

One morning, Bob finds himself unable to move his legs. Steven and Anna rush him to the hospital, where numerous tests are performed. Martin then reveals that his father died while Steven was operating on him. Martin blames Steven for his death and believes that to make things even, Steven must kill a member of his own family; if Steven refuses, all four will eventually die within a few days, beginning with paralysis, an inability to eat, and finally bleeding from the eyes. Steven has Martin ejected from the hospital. Later, Bob begins inexplicably refusing to eat, even when Steven begins furiously forcing him to.

Kim, who has fallen in love with Martin, collapses while singing in her school's choir and is also hospitalized. When she also starts rejecting food, she and Bob are both given feeding tubes. Steven finally confides in Anna about his history with Martin, eventually admitting that he had consumed alcohol before performing Martin's father's surgery. Martin phones Kim, instructing her to stand up and walk. She complies, only to become paralyzed again when he hangs up. Anna, witnessing this, confronts Martin and proclaims that he has no right to force her children to suffer. Martin asserts that this is merely justice for his father.

Production

The Killing of a Sacred Deer takes its title from part of the story of the ancient Greek tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides. On 11 May 2016, it was announced that Farrell was set to star in the film, with Lanthimos directing from a screenplay he wrote alongside Filippou. This was the second collaboration between Lanthimos and Farrell, after 2015's The Lobster. Kidman was cast that June, and Silverstone, Cassidy, Camp, Keoghan, and Suljic joined the project in August. The film was financed by Film4 and New Sparta Films along with the Irish Film Board, and was developed by Element Pictures with support from Film4, while HanWay Films served as worldwide sales agent.

By 23 August 2016, the film had begun principal photography at The Christ Hospital in Cincinnati. Shooting also took place in the Hyde Park and Northside neighborhoods of the city.

Release

The Killing of a Sacred Deer premiered at the 70th Cannes Film Festival on 22 May 2017, where it competed for the Palme d'Or and won Best Screenplay. In May 2016, A24 acquired North American distribution rights, and Haut et Court acquired French distribution rights to the film. It was theatrically released in the United States on 20 October 2017, and in Ireland and the United Kingdom on 3 November 2017.

Reception

Box office

In North America, The Killing of a Sacred Deer made $114,585 from four theaters in its opening weekend, an average of $28,646 per venue. It opened to £288,105 and finished on £857,615 in the United Kingdom. The film ultimately grossed $2.3 million in the United States and Canada, and $8.4 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $10.7 million.

Critical response

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 79% of 281 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.7/10. The website's consensus reads: "The Killing of a Sacred Deer continues director Yorgos Lanthimos' stubbornly idiosyncratic streak — and demonstrates again that his is a talent not to be ignored." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 73 out of 100, based on 45 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film 4 out of 5 stars, writing that "The Killing of a Sacred Deer moves with a somnambulist's certainty along its own distinctive spectrum of weird. It's an intriguing, disturbing, amusing twist on something which in many ways could be a conventional horror-thriller from the 1970s or 1980s, or even a bunny-boiler nightmare from the 90s." Mark Kermode of The Observer also gave the film 4 out of 5 stars, describing it as "a typically arch dramatic conundrum, laced with Lanthimos's trademark off-kilter artifice and deadpan humour" and "a Saw movie for the arthouse crowd, an increasingly sickening hunger game driven by an inflexible moral imperative, with a whiff of medical misadventure."

A. O. Scott of The New York Times opined that "Lanthimos is less interested in moral shock therapy or social criticism than in aesthetic estrangement. Sacred Deer feels like a dark, opaque bit of folklore transplanted into an off-kilter modern setting." Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times called the film "a lightly blood-spattered but technically immaculate nightmare of a movie that invites us to cackle alongside its director into the void" and commented, "With a nastiness that seeps into the movie like a slow-acting poison, [Lanthimos] turns a domestic-medical nightmare into a feverish exercise in style."

The Killing of a Sacred Deer was named "one of the best horror movies of the year" by Joey Keogh of Wicked Horror, who called it "horror in its purest, most distilled form, freed from the shackles of jump scares or exposition." Keogh wrote that Keoghan is the film's "ace card", giving "his best, most self-assured performance to date" as Martin, the "supremely frightening yet weirdly charismatic creation who makes even the act of eating spaghetti seem terrifying." Zhuo-Ning Su of Awards Daily wrote that the film is "less complex than [Lanthimos's] previous work but engrosses and unsettles all the same", adding that it "palpably improves" in its second hour. While praising the cast, particularly Kidman, Su added that Keoghan "shines brightest as the plain but charismatic boy who's somehow not quite right", calling his performance "vivid" and "fully realised".