Ok…I get it…Iphigenia…But Eww…

A few disclaimers up front:

Killing isn’t quite “Now Playing,” but it is playing now on Amazon and was a special request by The Divine Ms. Maggie on our Facebook sister site. This review will also include some fairly big Spoilers. We try to avoid those, but without them this movie will probably leave you confused and wanting to take a six-hour Clorox bath.

So the short version is that The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a psychological horror thriller without a lot of explicit horror or thrills - just moments that will leave you emotionally queasy. The story focuses on a doctor named Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell - Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them), his wife, Anna (Nicole Kidman - The Family Fang), their kids Bob (Sunny Suljic) and Kim (Raffey Cassidy), and a boy named Martin (Barry Keoghan - Dunkirk) who enters and quickly overturns their lives.

The cast, which also includes Alicia Silverstone and Bill Camp, is solid. The characters they play are (except for Bob) uniformly creepy and unlikable. Control is a big theme of the film and all the characters (again except for Bob) are in constant, if sometimes passive-aggressive, battles for dominance. This plays out in the bedroom, cookouts, a particularly disturbing scene with a box of cinnamon donuts, and around the dinner table. Lies are also a big feature and trying to keep track of all the different stories and excuses the characters offer will leave you feeling whipsawed.

Without getting into major spoilers, Doctor Steven is involved in some sort of relationship with uber-creepy Martin, a character that is unfailingly polite and gives off Young Ted Bundy vibes. As the story unfolds, Stevie’s family begin to sicken. Is Marty involved? What’s his relationship with Steven? And what in the !@#!@$%^ does any of that have to do with a deer?

Ok - feel free to tune out now or jump to the bottom if you are not spoiler ready.

Ready?

Last chance.

Ok, the name of the movie is an allusion to an ancient Greek play by Euripides titled Iphigenia in Aulis. The short version is that some Greeks on their way to fight a war in Troy get stuck on an island when the goddess Artemis makes the wind stop blowing. It turns out that the leader of the Greeks previously killed a…wait for it…sacred deer…belonging to Artemis and she is looking for some justice. In the play, the leader is forced to sacrifice his own daughter as penance. The deed done, he and his boys are able to sail on to Troy, drink some wine, and hop into a wooden horse.

At this point you may be wondering if the BMB staff is drinking some of that wine, but the big reveal for all this comes when Doc Steven is speaking with one of his children’s school counselors, who describes one of the kids delivering a touching rendition of Iphigenia.

So what’s going on??? Is Marty a serial killer? Are demons, aliens, or philologists behind everything?

Yeah…it’s none of that. The movie, like the play, is about the gods/universe/karma (pick your poison) seeking justice: a life for a life. The window dressing is the world of the twenty-first century, but The Killing of a Sacred Deer is not set in the “real” world. If you finish with a sense of “Huh…but what was really going on???” is is because the movie is not meant to be taken literally. It is (in the words of one of the characters) allegory.

Confused? Curious? You can catch the movie HERE and draw your own conclusions.

Let us know what you think in Comments or shoot us a note at movies@bigmovieblog.com.

For my part I’m going to have to take a 3-hour shower and watch classic Muppet episodes to clear this from my head before bed.

Three out of Five force-fed cinnamon donuts.

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