Killing a Sacred Deer ending explained: an impossible choice

The films of Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos are not for everyone. They're aggressively uncomfortable, poking and prodding audiences with all kinds of shocking content and even more shocking ways of delivering 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 Filippo or a script written by “The Big One” creator Tony McNamara, Lanthimos manages to infuse his films with his unique vision, using characters that seem completely inhuman , to force viewers to rethink their own. humanity. This can lead to his films being a little confusing, and that includes his 2017 thriller The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Colin Farrell plays heart surgeon Stephen Murphy, who develops a strange relationship with 16-year-old Martin Lang (Barry Keoghan), whose father died on Stephen's operating table. Martin begins to fit in with the Murphy family, becoming particularly close to Steven's teenage daughter Kim (Raffia Cassidy) and even younger son Bob (Sania Suljic), before revealing his true intentions to the family: he will have Steven choose a family member. victims or his wife and children will die of a slow, gruesome disease. While in our review, the film turned out to be too darkthere's also a lot of Lanthimos and Philippou's darkly absurd humor in The Killing of a Sacred Deer one of the best directors.

Let's dive into this little movie 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” and “Sampling' can refer to being 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. However, everyone talks strangely, angrily, and says things to each other that seem completely out of place. For example, Stephen tells a colleague that his daughter has started her period with the same casual attitude one might have when telling someone about a new recipe or a football game, and his colleague doesn't seem to budge at all.

Its extreme varies from film to film, but this kind of detached, inhuman acting is a Lanthimos trademark (complete with amazing dance scenesof which “Sacred Deer” is unfortunately absent). When his characters do eventually show moments of genuine vulnerability and emotion, it tends to feel more impactful because they otherwise seem so detached from their feelings. What's great is that it can work for a variety of effects, from pure horror to dark comedic bits that help break up otherwise bleak narratives. It's all about stirring the viewer into horror or laughter, or sometimes both. The Killing of a Sacred Deer's 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.

Although Lanthimos and Fillipou's script for The Killing of the Sacred Deer is an entirely original story, it is inspired by the ancient Greek tragedy of Iphigenia, daughter of the Mycenaean king Agamemnon (you know, guy Brian Cox played at Troy). In Iphigenia at Aulis, a version of the myth told by the classical tragedian Euripides, Agamemnon offends the goddess of the hunt, Artemis, when he kills a deer in her sacred forest as he prepares his forces to invade Troy. The goddess stops the winds the soldiers need to set sail and refuses to let them leave until the king settles matters by sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia. When she is sacrificed, the beautiful young woman turns into a doe, and it is assumed that Artemis took Iphigenia to live among the gods.

In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Martin takes on the role of the goddess Artemis, while Stephen is played by Agamemnon. However, instead of simply forcing Steven to sacrifice his daughter, Martin tortures Steven with a sort of “Sophia's Choice,” forcing him to choose which family member he wants to kill. However, there is a certain time limit because Martin has somehow cursed or poisoned the children, who lose the ability to walk and soon lose the will to eat. When their eyes begin to bleed, he tells them they will be close to death. If Stephen cannot make his choice, Martin will do it for him in this way. But how does he do it?

Keoghan plays Martin as a villain of sorts: an absolute teenage gremlin who clearly derives pleasure from causing Steven discomfort that may even exceed his need for revenge, but is he a supernatural being? He replaces the goddess Artemis from myth, and it certainly seems that he is capable of causing Murphy's children to be sick without a clear method. He also demonstrates his control by briefly allowing Kim to walk again, only telling her to do so during a phone call.

Since “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” is more of a parable than a realistic depiction of life, some things are simply left unexplained. It's possible that Martin poisoned the kids while he was getting close to each of them because he spends time alone with each, or he continues to drug them through some technique (the cigarettes that Kim is addicted to, maybe?). It's also entirely possible that he's actually some kind of inhuman, supernatural being capable of truly putting a curse on the Murphy family. Maybe that's why he can't eat spaghetti properly.

Much like Lanthimos and Fillipou's other collaboration, The Lobster, the “how” behind everything that happens doesn't really matter. We'll never know exactly how people are turned into animals when they can't find love in The Lobster and we'll never know how Martin manages to deliver his curse. More importantly, Steven is the one who set them up for failing to take responsibility for himself and his actions.

In the end, Stephen can't choose between killing one of his children or his wife, who tells him to kill one of the children because she still has another one. (Yup.) 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 uneasy, and Kim did a great report on “Iphigenia Aulis.” We'll never know how much of Martin's father's death was really Stephen's fault, though it's clear that he's not always the most responsible surgeon. In fact, there are hints that Stephen is either a necrophiliac or molests his unconscious patients, as he requires his wife to lie motionless in a T-position when they have sex, which his daughter later imitates in an attempt to seduce Martin.

Potentially unfathomable fetish aside, Steven's crime is an inability to choose a victim to the point where Bob starts bleeding from his eyes. a truly awful scene which shows how much the children suffer from Steven's inability to make up his mind. In classic tragedies, the tragic hero must have a specific flaw, and in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Stephen's major flaw is his inability to take responsibility, leading him to indecisiveness.

Eventually, he surrounds the family, blindfolds him, and spins in a circle with a loaded gun, firing when he stops. He kills Bob, fulfilling the terms of the sacrifice and saving both Kim and Anna (who never shows signs of illness, but Martin promises she will). Stephen couldn't even take responsibility for choosing who to sacrifice and instead left it up to random chance.

After Steven kills poor little Bob, we see the last scene of Steven and Martin meeting in the dining room before Steven introduces Martin to his family. The remaining members of the Murphy family sit together in Stephen and Martin's old place. The family has never been particularly expressive or warm, but it's clear that they've grown colder after Bob's death. It's easy to imagine how bitterness could arise because not only could Steven not really choose between them, but he put them in the situation in the first place.

Martin is also at the canteen and watches them from the bar counter. The family gets up and leaves, while Martin stays behind. Their ordeal is over as far as his involvement is concerned and now each can theoretically move on with their lives. Their complete lack of revenge against her points to the original text and his role as a human personification of a real goddess, though it could also just be another case of Stephen not acting. The film ends on that note, offering more questions than answers, which is honestly kind of the Lanthimos deal. For more tragic and darkly comic similes, by all means watch his latest film “Kinds of Kindness” which is basically a “Twilight Zone” for perverts. It's guaranteed to feel bad.