Review of The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) by Dave G — 28 Jun 2018

The film opens with full screen footage of open heart surgery, in all its gory detail, and from there it gets increasingly difficult to watch. If you aren't the type to flinch when confronted with the messy innards of mankind, then this film offers mighty rewards.

Few are the filmmakers today who can make incisions so precise and so deep as Lanthimos to reveal the bare reality of our species. It is a discomfort that becomes increasingly horrifying, as he peels away the layers of dermis, our beautiful social constructs that keep us contained, that hold the frightened, howling, raging animal that resides just beneath our skin at bay.

Reminiscent of Tarkovsky's late masterpiece, The Sacrifice, a self-assured man of science and reason is confronted with an impossible dilemma that demands the sacrifice of his esteemed ideals for a higher good, that of survival.

It is the question that western society faced at the time of Tarkovsky's film in the form of the eminent threat of nuclear war, and it is the same threat our society faces today in the form of superstitious powers that operate outside the fence of enlightenment thinking.

Lanthimos' metaphor is more oblique than Tarkovsky's, leaving the parable open to interpretation, but no less resonant. Farrell masterfully plays an honorable cardiologist who becomes overwhelmed by primordial terror as his faith in science crumbles before the mysterious power of young Martin.

He is as the proverbial lost sheep separated from his herd, who, when his shepherd's voice falls silent and his shepherd's sling and staff lie useless, must shed his skin and become the wolf he despises.

The killing of a sacred deer is a chilling reminder that chaos, the force that would raze the world as we know it, is at our gates, we invited it in, and we are responsible for it. And without tragic sacrifices it may just consume us.