An ancient Greek tragedy told using the language of art house cinema.
Awarded the prize for Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival 2017.
A successful heart surgeon (Colin Farrell) lives a contented family life with his wife (Nicole Kidman) and two lovely children. But soon this calm is disrupted by a ghost from the past, and one of the children loses the use of his legs for no obvious reason. The main character has to make an impossible choice: to sacrifice one of the members of his family in order to save the others.
The author of The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Yorgos Lanthimos, is a leading figure of contemporary Greek cinema who has built his career on absurd and surreal parables. His most recent film, Poor Things, was a favorite and award winner at the Venice Film Festival 2023. It is no surprise that he was able to find a suitable means of expressing the ancient laws of tragedy in contemporary cinema, the laws of destiny, fate, and the retribution of the gods, which cannot be explained by psychological motives. Regardless of the contemporary setting, the sterile interiors, alienated camera work, and frozen lack of emotion of the performances allow a meaning more ancient than classic psychology to be revealed. The plot evokes Euripides’ tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis, in which, in order to avoid the punishment of the gods, Agamemnon is forced to sacrifice that which is most dear to him, his innocent daughter Iphigenia. Lanthimos’ screenplay is also based on a less ancient theme, the so-called trolley problem, which was first formulated in the late twentieth century: are we prepared to accept the moral responsibility for the death of a smaller number of people in order to save a greater number of potential victims? Such ethical paradoxes are incompatible with contemporary morality. And yet Lanthimos shows that they are simply concealed under glass and cement and that we, without noticing, can easily go beyond the boundaries of normality. According to the laws of tragedy, after a law is broken there is a catharsis, and here a major role in that is played by avant-garde music by composers Sofia Gubaidulina and György Ligeti.ё
The film will be screened in English with Russian subtitles.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Director Yorgos Lanthimos
Ireland, UK, 2017. 121 min. 18+