So I saw the widely ecstatically-reviewed The Killing Of A Sacred Deer during the
week. Didn’t like it much. I’d like to know how Martin (the kid) puts his curse
on Steven (the surgeon’s) family, and why it works. I’d also like to know why
Steven (or his wife Anna) don’t ask Martin how he’s doing it. Or why they just
didn’t go to the cops. I know that with Yorgis Lanthimos one is just suppose
the interior logic of the world he creates, and take oddities and discrepancies
as givens of those worlds, but there is a bit difference between ‘everyone will
turn into an animal if they don’t get married within forty-five days’ (The Lobster) and ‘first, every member of
your family be paralysed from the waist down, then they will stop eating, then
they will start bleeding from the eyes and die' (The Killing Of A Sacred Deer). Something to do with agency. Or with
everybody in this world accepting a universal given, as opposed to a given
being generated by one person. Like, with Kafka’s The Trial, it really doesn’t
matter why K is arrested or what he’s accused of or guilty of, because it’s a metaphor
for general guilt (original sin?) in humanity, or a metaphor for a
bureaucratic, tyrannical state not needing a particular reason to condemn you
(they can always Trump (aha) one up). But it actually matters (at least to me)
how Martin is doing this and why Steven doesn’t call him on it. Dogtooth remains Lanthimos’ best flick:
that was an enclosed, incestuous world, and the parents made damn sure the
outside world wasn’t going to intrude on the fictions they were peddling to
their children (even if their reasons for doing so were entirely capricious).
My feeling is that Mr. L has been given too much rope, and he’s run out of
road.
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