The films of Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos are not for everyone. They're aggressively uncomfortable, goading and goading audiences with all kinds of shocking content and even more shocking ways of presenting it, but there's a lot to love about his deliciously disturbing filmography. Whether he's working from a script he developed with frequent collaborator Efthimis Philipou or The Big One creator Tony McNamara, Lanthimos manages to inject his films with his unique vision, using characters that seem totally inhuman to force the audience to think about own. humanity. This can lead to his films being a bit confusing, and that includes 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 bizarre relationship with 16-year-old Martin Lang (Barry Keoghan), whose father died on Stephen's operating table. Martin begins to insinuate himself into the Murphy family, becoming particularly close to Steven's young daughter Kim (Raffy Cassidy) and even younger son Bob (Sunny Suljic) before revealing his true intentions to the family: he will force Steven to choose a member. to the family. victim, or his wife and children will die of a slow, terrifying disease. While our review found the film a little too darkthere is also much of the dark absurdist humor of Lanthimos and Philippou, making The Killing of a Sacred Deer one of the best directors.

Let's dig into this twisted little film and answer some of its biggest questions—starting with why everyone's talking and acting so weird.

While some of the unusual dialogue choices in Lanthimos' films with McNamara, Poor Things andThe Beloved,” can be attributed to being in different time periodsThe Killing of a Sacred Deer appears to be contemporary and set in our world or a world very similar to it. However, they all speak in a bizarre, stilted way and say things to each other that seem completely out of place. For example, Stephen tells a coworker that his daughter has started menstruating with the same non-serious attitude he might have when telling someone about a new recipe or a soccer game, and his coworker doesn't seem phased at all.

The extremes of this vary with each film, but this kind of detached, inhuman acting is a Lanthimos trademark (along with incredible dance scenesof which "Sveto Elen" unfortunately has none). When his characters do eventually show moments of real vulnerability and emotion, it tends to feel more impactful because they otherwise seem so detached from their feelings. What's great about it is that it can work for a variety of effects, from pure horror to bits of dark comedy that help break up otherwise dark narratives. It's all about scaring the viewer into horror or laughter, 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 style and dialogue also help it feel more like a stage play, adding another layer of artificiality.

While the script for The Killing of the Sacred Deer by Lanthimos and Philippou is an entirely original story, it was inspired by the ancient Greek tragedy of Iphigenia, the daughter of the Mycenaean king Agamemnon (you know, boy Brian Cox played at Troy). In the version of the myth told by the classical tragedian Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis, Agamemnon offends the goddess of the hunt, Artemis, when he kills a deer in her sacred forest while preparing his forces to attack Troy. The goddess stops the winds the soldiers need to set sail and refuses to leave them until the king makes things right by sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia. As she is sacrificed, the beautiful young woman turns into a doe, and Artemis is supposed to have taken Iphigenia to live among the gods.

In The Killing of the Sacred Deer, Martin takes on the role of the goddess Artemis, with Stephen as Agamemnon. However, instead of simply forcing Stephen to sacrifice his daughter, Martin tortures Stephen with a sort of "Sophie's Choice", forcing him to choose which family member he wants to kill. There is little time limit, however, 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 the eyes, he tells them, they will be close to death. If Steven can't make his choice, Martin will make it for him this way. But how does it do it?

Keoghan plays Martin as a kind of restless rogue: an absolute thunder of a teenager who clearly derives joy from the discomfort he causes Stephen, which may even outweigh his need for revenge - but is he a supernatural being? He replaces the goddess Artemis of myth and certainly seems to be able to cause the disease in the Murphy children without any clear method. He also demonstrates his control when he briefly allows Kim to walk again only by instructing her to do so during a phone call.

Because "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" is more of a parable than a real-life representation, some things are simply left unexplained. It's possible that Martin poisoned the kids as he grew closer to each of them, as he spends time alone with each of them, or that he continues to drug them through some method (maybe the cigarettes he's hooked Kim on?). It's also entirely possible that he's actually some kind of inhuman, preternatural being capable of truly cursing the Murphy family. Maybe that's why he can't eat spaghetti properly.

Much like Lanthimos and Philippou's other collaboration, The Lobster, the "how" behind everything that happens isn't really the point. We'll never know exactly how, People turn into animals if they can't find love in The Lobster and we will never know how Martin manages to transmit his curse. More importantly, it is Stephen who has condemned them through his inability to take responsibility for himself and his actions.

In the end, Stephen cannot choose between killing one of his children or his wife, who tells him to kill one of the children because he may still have another. (Yes.) He even goes to his kids' school and asks the principal who is objectively the better kid, only to find out that they're both a little restless and Kim did a great report on "Iphigenia at Aulis." We'll never know for sure how much of Martin's father's death was really Stephen's fault, although it's clear that he's not always the most responsible surgeon. In fact, there are hints that Stephen is either a necrophile or abusing his unconscious patients, as he requires his wife to lie motionless in the T-position when they have sex, something his daughter later imitates when she tries to seduce Martin.

Potentially incomprehensible fetish aside, Steven's crime is that he can't pick a victim to the point where Bob starts bleeding from his eyes, a truly horrifying scene it highlights how much the children suffer because of Steven's inability to make a decision. In classical tragedies, the tragic hero must have a specific flaw, and in The Killing of the Sacred Deer, Stephen's great flaw is that he cannot take responsibility, which leads him to be indecisive.

Finally he puts his family around him, covers his eyes, and spins in a circle with a loaded gun, firing when he stops. He kills Bob, fulfilling the rules of sacrifice and saving both Kim and Anna (who never shows signs of the disease, but Martin promises she will). Stephen couldn't even take responsibility for choosing who to sacrifice, and instead left it to chance.

After Stephen kills poor little Bob, we see a final scene at the restaurant where Stephen and Martin meet before Stephen introduces Martin to his family. The rest of the Murphy family are sitting together in Stephen and Martin's old place. The family has never been particularly expressive or warm, but it's clear that even more coldness has settled over them since Bob's death. It's easy to imagine how much bitterness could arise because Steven not only really failed to choose between them, but to put them in the situation in the first place.

Martin is also at dinner and watches them from the bar. The family gets up and leaves, Martin staying behind. Their ordeal is over, as far as his involvement is concerned, and now everyone can theoretically move on with their lives. Their total lack of vengeance against him hints at the original text and his role as a human representation of an actual goddess, though it may just be another instance of Stephen failing to take action. The film ends on that note, offering more questions than answers, which frankly is kind of Lanthimos' whole thing. For more tragic and darkly comic parables, check out watch his latest movie Kinds of Kindness which is essentially the "Twilight Zone" for perverts. It's a guaranteed feel-bad good time.