That One Time I Watched 'The Killing of a Sacred Deer' With My Brothers

 by rhett rhodes - twitter: @rhettrhodes98

*SPOILERS; details of film's plot is spilled out here*

    One of my favorite things to do is to show people the movies that I hold near and dear, and the weirder the movie, the better the experience. I bought this movie on DVD on a whim randomly years back and I watched it over and over again; of course, I'm talking about Yorgos Lanthimos' 2017 masterpiece 'The Killing of a Sacred Deer'. The movie is a masterpiece to me and that's all that matters, I don't care who claims it isn't. It's not Yorgos' best, but I would never claim it as his worst. The film centers around a teenager named Martin who holds an everlasting grudge on the doctor and surgeon played by Colin Farrell that was too drunk to save his father during a life threatening heart surgery, and places a curse on him that will slowly kill each member of his family unless he sacrifices one member to save the others. To me, that plot was crazy as shit and enough to get me hooked, and I watched it over and over again day by day in 2019.

    I was telling my older brother Ryland about the movie one night and asked if he was bored enough we should watch it because it's pretty insane. My other older brother Rayden was already in the living room watching something on TV but it wasn't that important so I proposed the three of us just watch this weird movie I have on DVD and away we were. Watching this movie with them was incredibly fun and hilarious to me, despite the movie being an intense type of psychological drama infused with a bit of artistic cinema. Artistic cinema in general is a genre and film type that you would normally never catch my brothers watching depending on the subject matter.

    Pretty much through out this whole movie they were quiet. I usually talk a lot when I premiere a movie to someone but this time around I remember being pretty quiet and every now and then I would look over and see their facial expressions if something not normal happened on screen. Sunny Suljic, the kid notable for being in Jonah Hill's movie 'Mid-90's', plays the character of Bob, the son to Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell's characters, Anna and Steven; he loses the ability to walk first in the movie due to the curse put on him and his family, and I remember my brother Rayden simply asking "What in the fuck is even happening now?" I kind of just smirked and kept watching because I knew it would all be explained further into the film.

    Skipping ahead to the ending, the reaction from the both of my brothers were basically the same on this film. They didn't have the slip'n slag jazz that I had about it, that's for sure. "Damn, that was fucked up." was Ryland's response once the credits began to roll on screen. I think Rayden said just about the same thing, and I asked why and they said because they had to kill their son at the end. Yes, that part is certainly not what you hope for; when Steven blindfolds himself and spins around the room so that his choice of who to kill is completely random, us, the audience truly hopes that maybe the gun jams and doesn't work, maybe he miraculously misses each time, or maybe Martin lifts the curse last minute. But no, he does end up firing the gun and the bullet sadly hits Bob, lifting the curse once and for all. Normally missed on the first viewing or perhaps even the second viewing, it is foreshadowed that Bob is the one who will die in the movie as Bob begins to get sick, the camera pans in on a deer above his head. (I got that little fact from iMDB, but I notice every time I watch the movie now.)