A Short Review of The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

The first thing that really hit me about The Killing of a Sacred Deer was the dialogue, there’s just something so compelling about it. It’s utilitarian, every useless needless word cut out and chiselled away, and it’s bone achingly frank and blunt in its base honesty to the point of shock and awe. Through this dialogue, the characters come across as tactless and impulse driven, every thought has to be said and there is no second thought. It adds to the strange air of modern mythology the movie creates. Something part Norse mythology, part chivalric romance, part Shakespearian farce, and part modern family melodrama. A surgeon has cursed his family by allowing a man, a father, to die on his operating table and losing touch with that man’s son and not bending to the boy’s every whim. In his inability to take accountability for his own actions, he traps himself on a throne as his family plead to be spared from the one he must kill. And it is this that makes it a dramatic farce, every point of hilarity spoken with grave honesty and gravity, it’s deathly serious in its vapidity. The surgeon’s own hubris destroys his family, because he conveniently forgets that he too is a member of his family and could so easily make the sacrifice. A father for a father would be true balance, no?