Our two children are dying in the other room, but yes, I can make you mashed potatoes tomorrow.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

7.4/10 on IMDb
79% on Rotten Tomatoes

Chloe's thoughts: It's alright;
Proceed at your own risk

Watch it if you: Want to watch a weird, artsy, and philosophical movie;
Are a fan of psychological thrillers and suspension of belief

Cardiovascular surgeon Dr. Steven Murphy becomes a father figure to a young teenage boy, Martin, hoping to take him under his wing. However, Martin's presence brings out a deep tension in the Murphy household, which climaxes in an intense family tragedy.

I knew absolutely nothing about this film going in, except that it had very divisive reactions and it starred Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman. The start of this film was pretty weird, but in a very interesting way, and by the time I walked out of the theatre, my heart was racing. It's an intriguing film, but definitely not for everyone.

It's really hard to review this film without going into spoilers, so my spoiler-free section is going to be pretty short.

My overall impression of this movie is that it has a really weird tone to it, and that's not something that everyone would like. I quite enjoyed the tone because it was mesmerising and really captivated me, but to others I think it could be seen as really strange, and boring.

This can be because of all the characters speaking in a really monotone and flat way, which may make it seem like the actors (even Nicole Kidman) aren't really trying, but to me it just added to the bizareness of this world, a world that seems like our real world but has enough peculiarity in it to make it very different from our own world. In this world, people talk very robotically and very formally, and so relationships between friends, colleagues, and even family, do not seem natural or loving in the way they should be.

There's also a lot of silence in this movie, and a lot of... space (for lack of a better word). There's awkward silences between characters, there's long nothingness shots of characters not really doing anything, and there's lots of scenes where there isn't much happening, but there's an eerie sort of emptiness to the film that somehow unsettles you. The soundtrack is also extremely creepy and really made me shiver at times, it did a great job at setting this tone that made you keep fearfully anticipating what was going to go wrong. This, coupled with those slow, nothingness panning shots, really brings out the underlying sinister tone of the film.

Another thing is that it's actually really easy to laugh in this film. Like it was really bizarre, but at the same time there was humour within the bizareness. Particularly at the beginning of the film, where you're not quite used to the unnatural way the characters talk to each other.

I haven't seen any of the director's (Yorgos Lanthimos) films, although I've heard that The Lobster (2015) is amazing. After having seen this film, I am really really keen to see The Lobster because I do think he has a really unique way of directing that can't be ignored.

Spoiler time.

Click to show/hide spoilers:

So apparently this film is a modern retelling of the Greek tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis, written by Euripides. In this tragic play, Agamemnon has to make a decision to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, to please the goddess Artemis.

Likewise, here Dr. Murphy needs to decide on which of his family members he needs to sacrifice in order to please the very supernaturally powerful Martin. His son comes close to dying when he decides that fate would be the ultimate decider. And fate chooses to kill his son anyway.

Firstly, I think the biggest thing everyone was thinking was just, "Why can't he just shoot himself?!" It would have been a cleaner and easier resolution if he just shot himself. However, we don't know if this would actually resolve anything. His two children might die anyway, followed by his wife.

But besides that, I think the point of this movie was to try and show human selfishness. Here, Dr. Murphy is seen to be extremely selfish, not wanting to reveal his previous fatal mistake of drinking while on the job, wanting to hold Martin hostage until he reversed his curse upon the family, and also choosing to murder one of his own family over himself.

However, he's not the only one that's selfish here. Martin is selfish for putting this curse on the doctor because he wants to seek out his own vengeance, and he also wants his mother to get with Dr. Murphy despite his very evident unwillingness to (and I love how this scene just shows that Alicia Silverstone is still being as clueless as ever when it comes to reading men; I also loved the actor for Martin, the same boy from Dunkirk).

Then we see the rest of the Murphy family. Anna, Dr. Murphy's wife played by Nicole Kidman, is also extremely selfish, saying that the only logical thing is to kill one of the children because they could always have another child together. Then she lays down in bed naked trying to seduce him to remind him what he will miss if he kills her.

The children, too, try to bargain for their lives, with the son cutting his hair like his father wanted him to, and saying how he wants to be a cardiovascular surgeon to rub his father's ego. His daughter tried to tell him how much she loves the family, and tells him to kill her off in an attempt at reverse psychology. Heck, the father even goes to their school to see which of his children are better and, terribly, which one deserves to live more.

And yet none of this matters because he ties them up and shoots them at random. How many rounds was he willing to do before he finally shot someone? We will never know, because on the third shot, he kills his own son. It's a sad scene, but it's also kind of a relief, for both Dr. Murphy and the audience. We as the audience are put in this terrible fly-on-the-wall position with an intense roller coaster ride of emotions, and when it's over, it's a big sigh of relief.

But I would have liked to have seen him spinning around a third time, and then hear the sound of a gunshot just as the screen goes black, and the credits start to roll. I would have liked that idea of not knowing who was actually murdered, and whether a murder actually did appease Martin. But as the movie did, it continued, and we saw the long stare off between the family and Martin in the diner.

I think I left a bit unsatisfied not at the way the movie was directed, but more at the premise of it. We've seen movies before where our protagonists had to make tough choices related to their families. One example that I can think of (and probably not the best one) is The Box (2009), where a married couple is given the choice to receive a million dollars if they press a button that kills someone they don't know. The couple make a decision, and have to live with the consequences of their decision.

Moral dilemmas are not new to cinema. In fact they are pretty much just 2 hour long elaborations on the classic "Would You Rather" schoolyard games that we played. But it's interesting to have a moral dilemma because there are pros and cons to each option. Here, there's not really any option. We are not made to believe that anything can be done about the situation. It's a shitty situation, but it's one that the protagonist has to ride. There is no stopping Martin and his curse of the Murphys. The only option you're left with is who to kill.

And that can be a bit boring in retrospect. It definitely wasn't boring watching the movie, but after leaving and thinking about the movie, I was like, "Oh. That wasn't actually anything too special." And to me, it wasn't special because there wasn't much hope left in the audience for how things would end. Also, the ending itself is a bit mediocre, because even though they have to live with Dr. Murphy killing his own son, you almost feel like none of the characters have really developed or changed after the events of the movie.

Why? Because we've already seen how selfish they are. And how accepting they are of their situation. Sure, they try to fight back a little, but in the end they're all pretty accepting of the fact that someone has to die. So accepting, in fact, that they try to bargain for their lives instead of sacrificing their own. And so, because of that, having one of them die doesn't really seem like enough of a punishment for them. They seem to have accepted this as their fate, and if anything it seems like they're all a little bit relieved at the end of that cafe scene. Almost like how relieved Agamemnon was, because the sacrifice of his daughter meant he could lead his troops to Troy to fight in the Trojan War. The Murphy family is upset, of course, but they're relieved that they can keep on living.

In saying all that, I did enjoy this movie. It's not a film I would recommend to many people, though, because it is very weird and I don't think I know many who would actually take well to it. There are a lot of questions leaving this film, particularly because there seemed to be a lot of small storylines happening that didn't lead anywhere. But this all added to the confusion and creepiness of the film. It was a very tense movie, and that is props to the directing, acting, camerawork, and music of the film.