BEFORE: Nicole Kidman carries over from "The Goldfinch", and she'll be here for four films this week, which is one less than originally planned, because one of those films has to be withheld until February because it's kind of relationship-y and will be necessary then to make a crucial link in that romance chain. She can't possibly have the most appearances for this year, I think she'll end up with six instead of seven films for 2021, but that's still a good showing.
THE PLOT: A charismatic surgeon is forced to make an unthinkable sacrifice after his life starts to fall apart, when the behavior of a teenage boy he has taken under his wing turns sinister.
AFTER: Seriously. Effed. Up. That's what this movie is - it comes from the same director who made "The Lobster", and that was a very weird, very twisted, effed-up movie also. Only nothing like this, even with people being turned into lobsters and dogs, or having their brains put into lobsters and dogs and other animals, or maybe everybody pretending that people's brains were being put into lobsters and dogs, maybe the people were really being killed, it's impossible to say. I mean, maybe it wouldn't be so bad if you lost a family member who just couldn't find a way to get married, so society disposed of them, and in their place, you got a nice, friendly dog that you can pretend has your brother's brain in it or something. Or they give you a nice big lobster that you can take care of, in place of your sister or mother, and then when that lobster dies, you get to have a nice dinner. There's still the possibility that's what that movie was all about - right?
But there's no question here that this is a seriously messed up movie about some seriously messed up people - so I can only conclude that it comes from one seriously messed up director. Oh, and before I forget, SPOILER ALERT because it's going to be impossible to talk about this movie with potentially revealing some of the twists and turns in the plot, and there are a few real doozies here.
I got the feeling really early on that something was just OFF about this movie, maybe it's because there was creepy music playing like the whole time or something - or maybe it's just that everybody just seemed a little TOO perfect, and that only seems to happen in films like "American Beauty" or "Happiness", where the film just can't wait to get to the part when it starts to reveal how messed up everybody really is, what's behind the curtain of these oh-so-perfect lives. This surgeon has formed a relationship with a teenage boy, it seems to be as sort of a mentor to a kid who wants to get into the medical profession when he's older. Also, the kid is a classmate of the surgeon's daughter, so it's possible that this surgeon, Steven Murphy, sees himself in this young man, or he may even be grooming this young man as a future boyfriend or husband for his teen daughter. That would be unusual, sure, but it's certainly better than some of the other possibilities when a man takes an interest in a teen boy's development.
But that's not the only thing that's a bit off here, Steven's wife is a doctor herself, but they work in two different sections of the medical world, he's a heart surgeon and she's some kind of eye doctor, be it an ophthalmologist or whatever, it hardly matters. What sticks out is that when the lights go down and the kids are asleep, the couple's weird sex games kick in, and they seem to involve her pretending to be under anesthesia, or perhaps unconscious, or even dead. Yeah, that's a bit of a warning sign - I mean, whatever floats your boat, great, but it still seems to be a bit over the line for a doctor to fantasize about having sex with an unconscious patient, if that is what's going on here.
Then there's the kid himself, the teen that Dr. Murphy's taken an interest in, he's also a bit - well, OFF. I don't know if he's somewhere on the spectrum or just a bit of an odd duck, somebody with no social skills - though he seems to acquit himself OK socially, it's still very hard to get a read on him, like whether he's sincere and polite or if he's just learned to act that way. He's got a smoking habit, and he seems to be getting along OK with Dr. Murphy's daughter, Kim, but he also just reminds you of that weird kid you maybe knew in high school who just couldn't get his act together, and all of his conversations were awkward to some degree. If you can just imagine that kid you knew and maybe double up on the creep factor, you'd get Martin. (I just thank God that I can remember that kid in high school, because if you don't remember that kid, maybe you WERE that kid...)
Anyway, the whole reason the doctor has taken an interest in this kid's future seems to be connected to the fact that the boy's father died a few years earlier, and Dr. Murphy was the surgeon who operated on him after the accident, but he was unable to save him. It's hard to say that Dr. Murphy feels responsible, because he just doesn't give off that air - plus he point blank blames the anesthesiologist for the man's death, which is only a bit odd because the anesthesiologist blames HIM. So, umm, what really went down?
Martin does well when he has dinner with the Murphy family, but then he invites Dr. Murphy over for dinner with him and his mother - there things do not go as well. It's clear that Martin's mother has the hots for Dr. Murphy, but hey, he's a married man. It sure seems like Martin would love to set up Dr. Murphy with his mother, but is that the extent of his machinations, or is there more going on here than meets the eye?
And then, boom, there it comes, one character says something that confirmed all of my suspicions, that eerie feeling I had all along that something else was going on just below the surface of these people's perfect lives, and then suddenly nothing after that could be the same. Well, at least my instincts were spot on - I'm doing well today, one of my guesses for the identity of somebody on "The Masked Singer" got confirmed, so I guess today I'm 2 for 2. I don't really want to say much more about the plotline of "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" though - just know that I kind of called it correctly, even though two years ago when I put this on the list, I would have wagered it was a film about hunting deer, or maybe a family that also hunts deer on the side. Nope, there's no deer to be found here.
There's a lot that then gets called into question here after this point, like what exactly is the state of Dr. Murphy's marriage to Anna? And how far would a parent go to protect their children, and vice versa? You sometimes hear a parent say that they would die for their kids, but would they REALLY give up their life for their kids, or is this just something that people say? Same goes for a marriage - it's so easy to say, "I'd die without you." but then on the other hand there's that "Till death do us part" thing, and if that's your deal, aren't you always secretly hoping that the other person's going to go first? I mean, just being honest, which way works out better for you? And if you really care about your parents, like would you give them a kidney or part of your liver if it kept them alive a little longer? There's no right or wrong answer here, these are just thought experiments so I can raise questions pertinent to this film without coming out and giving it all away.
There's a strong connection here to "The Goldfinch", as both films suggest that the loss of a parent could drive somebody to act in unusual ways - without getting too into details about the different stages of grief, losing his mother led Theo in "The Goldfinch" to steal a painting. OK, maybe it's not a direct or even logical connection, but that's where the film has chosen to plant its flag - quite similarly, "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" suggests that the loss of his father has turned Martin into something of a sociopath, he's incapable of empathy or he refuses to be aware of how his actions could harm another person. I may not agree with this as a story device, but in both cases, it's where we find ourselves.
Does this create a perfect story? No, of course not - but there's still a chance that the actions that follow are meant to be seen as metaphors rather than real occurrences, because some are just too gruesome to even describe. Again, seriously effed up, but I wonder if that's somehow the point, that a filmmaker challenged himself to take the story to places where one has never been before, actions and consequences that are larger and more powerful than those depicted before, and then somehow once we get there, to these very shocking places, the fact that they were possible to reach makes them somehow not so shocking? Wait, that can't be right, can it?
I'm reminded of the Old Testament here, something that the wise king Solomon allegedly did when there were two women each claiming that a child was theirs, though one was really the mother of a child that had died. Solomon's solution was to offer to cut the baby in two, and each woman would be awarded half. One mother was fine with that ruling, and the other one offered to give up her claim to the child, as long as it was not killed - Solomon thus determined that the second mother was the true mother, because she genuinely cared for the child's life more than her own happiness. Who knows if this story ever really took place, because there are versions of it in several cultures, it's possibly just a metaphor - but it illustrates a point. "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" just shows us what can happen when the world is full of people who act like the first mother, I guess, who just put their own concerns and pleasure before everything else.
(You know, like when somebody refuses to wear a mask because it's uncomfortable or inconvenient, and just doesn't give two shits about the other people they could spread a deadly virus to, even members of their OWN FAMILY. Just saying. This film was released in 2017, well before the pandemic, but maybe there are a few lessons here about personal sacrifices that need to be made for the common good?).
Yeah, I've got plenty of NITPICK POINTS here, but I can't really get into them without giving away all the twists and turns in the plot. The biggest one is how the doctors can't really figure out what's wrong with the kids, but wouldn't there be some kind of checklist of the types of things that they should check for? Why is everyone in the film so bad at medicine? For that matter, why doesn't anybody seem willing or able to call the police when bad things happen? Does this family live in a part of the U.S. where the police have been defunded, or 9-1-1 doesn't work?
Also starring Colin Farrell (last seen in "Dumbo" (2019)), Barry Keoghan (last seen in "Dunkirk"), Raffey Cassidy (last seen in "Vox Lux"), Sunny Suljic (last seen in "The House with a Clock in Its Walls"), Alicia Silverstone (last seen in "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), Bill Camp (last seen in "Wildlife"), Barry G. Bernson, Herb Caillouet, Denise Dal Vera (last seen in "The Next Three Days"), Drew Logan, with archive footage of Bill Murray (last seen in "Zappa"), Andie MacDowell (last seen in "The Bill Murray Stories").
RATING: I seriously do not know how to rate this film. For power and intensity and maybe even metaphor, it's like a 6, maybe even a 7. But for being deeply dark and disturbing and for showing me things that I didn't really want to see, things I didn't even know could be seen, I feel like it deserves a 3 or a 4, because the scale is based on enjoyment, at the end of the day. And I did NOT enjoy this, but still somehow I respect it, because it does have stones to go where it went. So I don't know, maybe it's a cumulative wash and I give it a 5? But not your typical 5, where a film is just kind of blah and THERE, this one swung for the fences and tried to be about something, just not something that was enjoyable.
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