But Lanthimos and Filippou aren't interested in just adapting this Greek myth. Martin is both Artemis desiring the balance-restoring sacrifice, and the threat of Grecians killing Steven's family if he doesn't go through with it. His sin of hubris translates into Steven's reckless drinking and displays of wealth.
In some manuscripts and translations of the play, though it's up for debate whether it's part of Euripides' original texts, Agamemnon surprisingly decides to pull a final trick on this plan, replacing his daughter Iphigenia with - you guessed it - a sacred deer.Īpplying this ancient story to Lanthimos' work feels like enough of a 1:1 translation to start. After furious debate among his family and fellow generals, Agamemnon decides to undergo the sacrifice, reasoning that angry Greeks eager for victory would kill his entire family if he didn't. As you might imagine, Artemis didn't like that too much, demanding the blood sacrifice to bring Agamemnon back to earth. Agamemnon's fatal sin, his tragic flaw, if you will? Vanity - after the first wave of battles against Troy, he boasted that he was as skilled a battler as Artemis herself. In the play, part of a trilogy Euripides wrote in his final years on earth, Agamemnon ponders whether or not to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis, who is purposefully stopping proper winds for Agamemnon's fleet to successfully complete their invasion of Troy. And wouldn't you know it, Sacred Deer is inspired by an ancient Greek tragedy: Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis (called out by Lanthimos and Filippou directly, in revealing that Cassidy's Kim wrote an essay on Iphigenia for her high school class).
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In exploring these themes, the film reminded me very much of a modern update on a Greek tragedy.
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The Killing of a Sacred Deer is directly concerned with fate, with cosmic punishment of human hubris, with our so-called free will crumbling under the uncaringly cruel banalities of the universe. The person who takes the longest to ask the question and accept his answer? Steven. Namely, "why?" A question that everyone in the Murphy family seems interested in asking and accepting - from Anna's examination of Steven's past sins, to the children's complete willingness to take what's happening at face value. The closest moment we get to this kind of explanatory detective work comes from Steven's wife Anna (Kidman) discovering through Steven's partner Matthew ( Bill Camp) that Steven was likely drunk during Martin's father's surgery - revealing not the source of Martin's "powers," but further "reason" that Steven deserves to be punished.īut: There is still much to discuss about Sacred Deer's ending, outside of the irrelevant "how" of Martin's grip over the Murphy family. No grand conspiracy, no examination of Martin's past, no revelation of mythological superpowers.
And thankfully, the film is not interested in the mechanics of how Martin can mystically will this poor family to undergo these horrors - while the film ramps up in pace as Steven tries to stop Martin's actions, even resorting to kidnapping and torture, there is never a plot to uncover the "how" of his actions. Yes, from a nuts-and-bolts storytelling standpoint, Lanthimos and co-writer Efthymis Filippou's screenplay has its characters say exactly what's gonna happen, and then proceeds to let it happen.