Movie of the Week: Colin Farrell and Barry Keoghan shine in the eerie A24 fable ‘The Killing of a Sacred Deer’
“I’m really sorry about Bob,” Barry Keoghan’s pasty pre-teen Martin groans to close friend and surgeon Steven, played by Colin Farrell, in Yorgos Lanthimos’ gripping contemporary Greek tragedy. Batting away the comment about his sick son, Farrell’s stoic character states, “It’s nothing serious,” before Martin swiftly snaps back, “No, it is”, with the tone of the young man suggesting something more sinister beneath his adamance.
This pivotal moment in Lanthimos’ 2017 psycho-thriller hinges proceedings away from convention and into something far more profound. Released two years after the director boosted his international reputation with 2015’s The Lobster, also starring Farrell, The Killing of a Sacred Deer harks back to a familiar sense of bleak desolation. The same is also pervasive in his early Greek films Alps and the Oscar nominee Dogtooth, creating a commercial piece of grim consumable tragedy.
Set in modern-day Cincinnati, the sinister drama tells the story of an open-heart surgeon named Steven, who forms a relationship with the teenage son of a man he mistakenly killed during an operation. Blaming Steven for his father’s death, the son, Martin, explains that to “balance things”, Steven must kill a family member to avoid them all suffering a long and arduous demise.
Reeling off the consequences of his lack of action as if he’s reading from a demonic tablet, Keoghan’s Martin drools: “One: paralysis of the limbs. Two: refusal of food to the point of starvation. Three: bleeding from the eyes. Four: death. One, two, three, four”. The words spill from his mouth like the possessed ramblings of The Exorcist’s Regan MacNeil, becoming the unlikely antagonist of Lanthimos’ thinly veiled horror tragedy.
Keoghan is disturbingly excellent as the angel of death, with his first major starring role forecasting his success in the industry half a decade later, earning his first Academy Award nomination in 2022. An innocent yet malevolent figure, the Irish actor is the perfect choice to play Lanthimos’ enigmatic devilish cherub, playing the role with the same matter-of-fact dissociation of the Mystery Man in David Lynch’s dreamy Lost Highway.
Goading the family, Martin is an omniscient overseer demanding a sacrifice, a titular ‘sacred deer’, for his emotional troubles after the loss of his father. Steven, Farrell’s tense protagonist, is Martin’s conduit, channelling his warnings and parables through his reluctant ears. Both actors create the perfect cauldron of anxiety and intensity, helped by Lanthimos’ excellent script that borders fantasy, tragedy and farce.
Taking considerable creative license from the Greek tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides, The Killing of a Sacred Deer bridges the director’s cultural heritage with contemporary cinematic bravado, making a movie that baffles with confidence. Written apart from the original text, the director used Euripides’ play to comment on the relevance of such tales, telling Cinevue: “They still concern us, but actually, we deal with them even less, and we’re kind of shocked and scandalised when we dare to present them in a contemporary setting”.
Addressing texts made centuries ago whilst embedding his own film within a context of contemporary filmmaking, Lanthimos creates an unsettling modern parable that feels ripped from the pages of a new-age biblical text. Haunting and mechanical, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a chilling tragedy that forces viewers to face their mortality and see eye-to-eye with the moral structures of past centuries.
