How Effective is The Killing of a Sacred Deer’s Rendition of Greek Allegory?: A recent surge of independent production houses, most popularly A24, has allowed a new generation of auteurs to leave their mark on modern cinema. Many view this as a rebuttal against the vapid tendencies of commercial Hollywood. Still, lately, small-budget arthouse films have started to obey an apparent set of traits, namely glossy cinematography and provocative storytelling. In spite of the works that have utilized these aspects to their benefit, some films seem to parody them and ironically become just as customary as the big-budget productions they were supposed to contest.
Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is difficult to categorize in this respect. His work is arguably the most recognized amongst a group of strange films from his country called “The Greek Weird Wave.” He is provocative in the aforementioned sense, but his filmic quotations and stylistic commitment are equally undeniable. With all their darkly humorous peculiarities, almost all of Lanthimos’ films have divided audiences to a significant extent, and his 2017 thriller, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, is no exception. Here, Lanthimos contemporizes the Greek myth of Iphigenia by situating it in the context of a modern nuclear family. What results is a work of sheer emotional sterility, but not without its drawbacks.
This essay aims to examine the film predominantly from a directing standpoint, focusing on how Lanthimos’ style complements and conflicts with his narrative ambitions.
The Style of Lanthimosian Cinema:
Imagine a world where people live like machines, moving and behaving with sharp rigidity. Everything from employment to family dinners to get-togethers has been reduced down to a mere task, and all tonal complexities from conversations vanish, leaving behind small talk that feels like it’s coming from an AI Chatbot. Lanthimos creates such worlds and implements each of these aspects intentionally. His dystopic, detached brand of satirical cinema is made decidedly for the sake of unease and dissatisfaction.
The Killing of the Sacred Deer is perhaps the most extreme version of this, and it’s not so different from its central patriarchal figure, Steven: cold, clinical, and unaffected. Having neglectfully failed a heart surgery on one of his patients, Steven attempts to rectify his mistakes by acting like a father figure for the patient’s son, Martin. However, Martin has underlying plans for vengeance, or as he sees it, justice, and this is not entirely unreasonable considering that his character represents the goddess Artemis in the corresponding Greek myth. Steven must then sacrifice one person from his family in order to prevent them all from dying.
Stylistically, cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis mostly abides by the Lanthimosian framework. His camera dollies and zooms throughout the film’s spaces, unmistakably reminiscing Stanley Kubrick’s work, especially The Shining. Numerous tracking shots are also utilized to imply the presence of some external entity (confirmed by Lanthimos in an interview), which parallels the audience’s perspective. And there’s a distinct cleanliness to the film’s visual sheen, emphasizing Lanthimos’ fixation on emotionlessness within intrinsically emotional events.
Many articles and video essays have rationalized Lanthimos’ style by commenting upon these points and labeled him the modern-day Kubrick, but it’s not quite there for me. There is a clear visual interest in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, but every cinematographic technique and every shift in the sound design seems to constantly draw attention to itself.
Even though Kubrick’s style was also loud, it functioned far better as every element of his compositions seeped nicely into the formal construction of his films. Here, every trick stands out, so what could have been a hypnotic dreamscape ends up feeling like an overly calculated exercise. But this seems to be Lanthimos’ exact intention – he wants us to roam the steely surface of his film, forgoing any investment in his characters or story. Hence, I am reluctant to conclude that his technique is misguided because it’s clear he knows what he is doing.
Furthermore, the film’s formal structure will occasionally deviate from its regularities through the insertions of close-ups, hand-held cam, slow-motion shots, and fish-eye lenses. Even compositional aspects are featured, such as frames-within-frames and negative spaces. One could rationalize using these techniques too: hand-held cam builds tension; close-ups emphasize visceral sentiments, and fish-eye lenses create a distorted or otherworldly view – these are cinematic guidelines used by several directors frequently. Yet Lanthimos often positions these tricks where they least “make sense,” contributing to the absurdist tone of the film. If his aim truly is to make the movie entirely void of meaning, then he may have achieved it, but there are other viewpoints that interest me.
The Theory of Abjection and Scrutinization of the Family Unit:
Bulgarian-French philosopher and literary critic Julia Kristeva examined society’s reaction to the jeopardization of human meaning via the loss of distinction between “the subject and the object” (or “the self and the other”), which she called “the abject.” For instance, the notion of a corpse evokes both morbid curiosity and intense abhorrence since it directly indicates the loss of human value. Likewise, reminders of our corporeal reality, whether an open wound or bodily fluids are likely to elicit a similar response as they threaten the elevated image of humanity we’ve formed.
This theory of abjection can be helmed to challenge social norms, and Lanthimos attempts to weaponize the associated revulsion in this way. Still, the extent to which this is successful is dubious. In her essay on The Favourite, Katherine Connell critiques Lanthimos’ period piece for its utilization of the abject. She notes how, despite the attention brought upon Queen Anne’s “bodily intensity,” Lanthimos’ style attracts more attention (as mentioned in the previous section). What could have been a complex outlook on gender in 18th-century England ended up becoming an artistic exercise, which is not at all a problem on its own. But it often seems to domineer the thematic aspects of the film rather than complementing them.
The Killing of the Sacred Deer has moments that employ the abject to confront the notion of the nuclear family. Consider the scene where Martin meets Steven’s wife, Anna, and his children, Kim and Bob. Away from the adults of the family, Kim erratically mentions that she’s started menstruating, and Bob starts to discuss the amount of armpit hair Martin has. Here, Steven’s children intentionally deviate from the image of the ideal family unit in order to act competitively toward Martin and his greater sense of maturity. Another notable aspect is Anna’s infidelity towards Steven, which further exposes the family’s instability.
In regard to body horror, the film opens with a shot of a pulsating heart, and other moments of gore also occur later in the runtime (e.g., Martin biting his own arm). All of these examples effectively uncover our corporeal reality, thereby transgressing from the safety of surface images and creating great unease. The issue once again is that, despite being sown firmly into the fabric of Lanthimosian cinema, these moments seem to encroach on our comfort more for aesthetic purposes than some sociopolitical commentary.
How the Ancient Intrudes the Modern:
Another route to analyzing the film’s horror is through an aspect that is prominent in even the most conventional works of the genre: a connection between the ancient and the modern. From The Exorcist (which Mark Kermode cites in his review of The Killing of a Sacred Deer) to the Conjuring franchise, many horror films weaponize ancient religious imagery in their attempts to evoke fear. Mythology is far greater than us – it has a sense of insurmountable power and obscurity, which we often associate with anxious sensations. It’s understandable, then, to see so many horror films utilizing such a context.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer is directly based on the aforementioned Greek myth of Iphigenia, where the goddess Artemis demands Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia as a punishment for killing one of Artemis’ sacred stags. So much of the film’s horror comes from its recontextualization of mythology in the modern world, which allows an unknown force to intrude on something we deem familiar. As discussed before, many cinematographic choices here are intentionally chosen by Lanthimos to place us in the position of an omnipotent entity such as fate. Instead of being victimized at the hands of a divine power, we’re forced to see our world from its perspective, and it’s painfully callous.
This idea is further accentuated later in the film, particularly when Martin is tied up in the family’s house. While Steven beats Martin for explanations, Anna kisses his feet and releases him. Not only does this highlight the inherent gender disparities within the nuclear family, but it confirms the all-encompassing power of fate. For a scientific man with workmanlike efficiency and discipline, Steven resorts to stress and rage as he gives into claims that he believes are superstitious. The collapse of the nuclear family is, then, complemented by the termination of rationalism by an ancient force – two significant sources of stability for human societies.
Yet Lanthimos’ approach to direction simply doesn’t allow these themes to prosper entirely. Reading the film as a mythological text or a story of the nuclear family imploding is admittedly powerful, but the stylistic choices here seem to suffocate this. The way Lanthimos presents his work is incredibly ambiguous, so it may seem “too deep” for viewers to comprehend, but this could stem from a dissonance between thematic ambition and form. When every camera movement and sound design shift sticks out conspicuously, the potential for thoughtful exploration is suppressed. Lanthimos knows exactly what style he wants to commit to and what story he wants to tell. The harmony of these two, however, seems doubtful.
