Explanation of the ending of Killing the Sacred Deer: An impossible choice

The films of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos are not for everyone. They’re wildly uncomfortable, pushing and prodding the audience with all sorts of shocking content and even more shocking ways of presenting it, but there’s a lot to love about his unsettling filmography. Whether working from a screenplay he developed with frequent collaborator Efthymis Philippou or written by The Great creator Tony McNamara, Lanthimos manages to inject his films with his own unique vision, using characters that seem utterly inhuman to force the audience to think about their own. Humanity. This can lead to his films being a bit confusing, including his 2017 thriller The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

“The Killing of a Sacred Deer” stars Colin Farrell as heart surgeon Stephen Murphy, who develops a strange relationship with 16-year-old Martin Lang (Barry Keoghan), whose father died on Stephen’s special operating table. Martin begins to insert himself into the Murphy family, getting particularly close to Steven’s former daughter Kim (Raffey Cassidy) and even younger son Bob (Sunny Suljic) before revealing his true intentions to the family: he will have Steven pick a family member to do it. A sacrifice, otherwise his wife and children will die of a slow and terrifying disease. while Our review found the film a bit bleakThere is also a great deal of dark, absurdist humor provided by Lanthimos and Filippo, making The Killing of a Sacred Deer a great film. One of the best director.

Let’s delve into this quirky little movie and answer some of its biggest questions – starting with why everyone is talking and acting weird.

While some of the unusual dialogue choices in Lanthimos’ films with McNamara, “Poor Things” and “Poor Things”Favorites” can be attributed to their existence in different time periods“The Killing of a Sacred Deer” appears to be contemporary and set in our world or a world very similar to it. Everyone talks in a weird, stilted way, and tells each other things that seem completely out of place. For example, Stephen tells a coworker that his daughter has started her period with the same casual attitude one might have when telling someone about a new recipe or a soccer game, and his coworker doesn’t seem phased at all.

Its intensity varies with each film, but this kind of spaced-out, dehumanizing acting is Lanthimos’ trademark (In addition to the amazing dance scenesof which unfortunately there is no “sacred deer”). When his characters finally show moments of vulnerability and genuine emotion, they tend to feel more poignant because they seem so disconnected from their feelings. What’s great is that they can work with different influences, from pure horror to bits of black comedy that help break up the dark narratives. It’s all about making the viewer terrify or laugh, or sometimes both. In the case of “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” the story is based on a classic tragedy and the unusual acting and dialogue also help make it feel like a play, giving another layer of artificiality.

While the screenplay for The Killing of a Sacred Deer by Lanthimos and Filippo is entirely original, it is inspired by the ancient Greek tragedy of Iphigenia, daughter of the Mycenaean king Agamemnon (you know, The man played by Brian Cox in the movie “Troy”). In the version of the myth told by the classic tragedian Euripides, “Iphigenia at Aulis,” Agamemnon insulted the goddess of the hunt, Artemis, when he killed a deer in her sacred forest while preparing his forces to invade Troy. The goddess stops the winds the soldiers need to sail and refuses to let them leave until the king sets things right by sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia. While being sacrificed, the beautiful young woman is transformed into a doe, and Artemis supposedly takes Iphigenia to live among the gods.

In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Martin plays the goddess Artemis, with Stephen as Agamemnon. Instead of forcing Steven to sacrifice his daughter, Martin tortures Steven with a kind of “Sophie’s Choice”, forcing him to choose which family member he wants to kill. However, there is little time limit, as Martin has somehow cursed or poisoned the children, who lose the ability to walk and soon lose all desire to eat. When they start bleeding from their eyes, he tells them they are going to die. If Stephen can’t make up his mind, Martin will do it for him this way. But how does he do that?

Keoghan plays Martin as a kind of mischievous goblin: an absolute ghost of a teenager who clearly derives joy from the discomfort he causes Steven that may override his need for revenge – but is he a supernatural being? He replaces the goddess Artemis from myth and certainly seems capable of causing illness in the children of Murphy without any obvious method. He also shows his control when he briefly allows Kim to walk again only by instructing her to do so during a phone call.

Since “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” is more of a parable than a realistic representation of life, some things are simply left unexplained. It’s possible that Martin poisoned the children as he got closer to each of them, because he spends time alone with each of them, or that he continues to drug them through some method (maybe the cigarettes he got Kim addicted to?). It is also possible that he is actually some kind of supernatural inhuman being capable of truly cursing the Murphy family. Maybe that’s why he can’t eat spaghetti properly.

Just as with another Lanthimos and Filipou collaboration, The Lobster, the “how” of everything that happens isn’t really the point. We will never know exactly how, People turn into animals if they can’t find love in ‘The Lobster’ How Martin managed to pass on his curse, we will never know. More importantly, it was Stephen who destroyed them through his inability to take responsibility for himself and his actions.

In the end, Stephen is unable to choose whether to kill one of his children or his wife, who tells him to kill one of the children because she can still bear another child. (Yikes.) He even goes to his kids’ school and asks the principal which kid is objectively better, and only learns that they’re a bit messy and that Kim gave an excellent report on “Iphigenia in Aulis.” We will never know for sure to what extent Martin’s father’s death was Stephen’s fault, though it is clear that he is not always the most responsible surgeon. In fact, there are hints that Stephen is either necrophilic or molesting his unconscious patients, as he asks his wife to lie still in a T position when they have sex, something his daughter later imitates when she attempts to seduce Martin.

Aside from the unfathomable passion, Stephen’s crime is his inability to choose sacrifice to the point where Bob begins to bleed from his eyes, A truly horrific sight This highlights how much the children suffer because of Stephen’s inability to make decisions. In classical tragedies, the tragic hero must have a specific flaw, and in The Murder of a Sacred Deer, Stephen’s great flaw is that he cannot take responsibility, which leads him to hesitate.

Eventually, he puts the family around him, covers his eyes, spins in a circle with a loaded gun, and fires when he stops. He killed Bob, fulfilling the rules of sacrifice and saving both Kim and Anna (who never showed signs of illness, but Martin promised her he would). Steven couldn’t even take the responsibility of choosing who to sacrifice, instead leaving it up to random chance.

After Steven kills poor little Bob, we see the final scene at the restaurant where Steven and Martin used to meet before Steven introduced Martin to his family. The rest of the Murphy family sits together at Stephen and Martin’s old place. The family had never been particularly expressive or warm, but it’s clear that more coldness has settled in in the wake of Bob’s death. It’s easy to imagine how bitterness could arise because Stephen not only failed to choose between them, but also put them in the situation in the first place.

Martin is also in the restaurant, watching them from the bar table. The family gets up and leaves, while Martin stays behind. Their ordeal, as far as his involvement was concerned, was over, and now everyone could theoretically move on with their lives. Their complete lack of revenge on him points to the original text and his role as the human representation of an actual goddess, though it may also be just another example of Stephen failing to take action. The film ends on that note, offering more questions than answers, which is honestly kind of the whole Lanthimos deal. For more tragic and darkly comedic parables, check it out Watch his latest film, “Types of Kindness” It’s basically the “twilight zone” for deviants. It’s a time guaranteed to feel bad.