The Killing of a Sacred Deer

    

The opening scene of the movie was open-heart surgery, and that was enough for a person like me who feel deprived due to the season break of Grey’s Anatomy.  

The story of the movie revolves around the family of four, Dr. Steven (Colin Farrell), a cardiothoracic surgeon, Anna (Nicole Kidman), an ophthalmologist, and two children, Kim and Bob.

While they are all happy merry family, and everything looks fine from the exterior, the cracks start showing very soon. For me, a peculiar and incomprehensible relation was a teenage boy Martin, meeting Dr. Steven, and the equation between two was particularly disturbing, Weird fetish of Doctor, thank God, not with the boy.

Soon it was disclosed he was his patient and son of the patient who died during the procedure with Dr. Steven. Initially, it looked like guilt, when Steven gave him expensive watch and his time on and off-work, while the family was completely unaware.

Later he was brought at home, and soon he became the love interest for Kim. That’s when things took a sickening turn. Bob fell ill and couldn’t walk when Martin came to visit the boy he explained it very clearly to Steven how things will go downhill until a sacrifice is made.

Now we can clearly see the influence of mythology in the writing of Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou, hence the sacrifice of sacred deer.

Just like Martin explained, his wife and children will get ill and then one by one start dying until a sacrifice. First, Bob lost mobility in his leg and stopped eating altogether; then, the last stage was bleeding out of eyes; according to Martin, you must make a sacrifice before that stage.

Since Steven was a man of science, he did not believe in a load of crap and kept investigating and testing until Kim followed that’s when Anna started looking for answers. She figured out the surgery happened during the drunk-Steven-phase hence the error and revenge. 

 

According to Martin, this is only justified, and that is the only fair thing. When science started failing him, in exasperation, Steven is seen imprisoning Martin in his house’s basement, and things keep getting gory.                  

To my utter astonishment, around the end of the movie, Steven is seen covering his face, with his wife and children sitting on sofas and spinning himself whom to kill. Following Martin’s advice, as it was the only way to save the other two.

Since he could not decide which one to kill, meanwhile, he was seen evaluating his assets, as in which child has more potential and which child would possibly be a liability (horrified!!).

While for me, mythology was a very messed up topic to understand, just like Steven, I work on logic and science, but anywho, the movie sure left my head rattled. To feel better, I have to watch something decent and logical; hence 20 minutes of Sherlock Holmes helped me recalibrate and sleep.