Like "Mother," "Death of the Sacred Deer" is equally cryptic to audiences outside the lands governed by Hebrew and maritime civilizations. Leaving aside the film's centralization hints, with the two previous films "Dogtooth" and "The Lobster", Lanthimos, who set off a wave of so-called Greek weirdness, has made people familiar with his film language. Blurring the boundaries of species and allegorically showing human individual contradictions and group conflicts are not new. They remind people of George Orwell's "Animal Farm". Probably it is this brand-new spatial texture and logical standard that make people puzzled and unable to find the entry point of understanding. However, the first place I cut into was the sense of ritual of the camera. The wide-angle lens with a slight tilt made the protagonists as solemn as stepping into the altar, and the soundtrack was a voice-over. In addition to the physical discomfort caused by the camera, it was also in front of the plot. Revealed: This is a modern version of the native Iphigenian mythology—“During the Trojan War, when King Agamemnon of Mycenae killed a sacred deer that should have been sacrificed to Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, Provoking Artemis, the king's fleet was trapped in the port of Oris by the storm. In order to get the goddess's forgiveness, Agamemnon had to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia as a tribute." I learned about this myth before the second brush, so I found out that the director is actually a blank space with hidden clues. In this way, the character's behavior that originally made me feel weird basically makes sense.
In the movie, this myth becomes a revenge story under medical malpractice. The director interprets the ancient proposition of "a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye" in "The Old Testament" in a solemn and unhurried way, which is not available in "Mother". Barry Keoghan's active and easy acting is a highlight. He plays the "goddess", the courteous but aggressive vengeful boy Martin, who cursed the family of doctors who caused his father's death, and only the doctor killed himself The death of a family member "sacrifices" to end the curse. In this way, the most terrifying part of the film appears: each family member begins to seek forgiveness from the head of the family in their own way. However, this kind of behavior that is terrifying and abnormal when viewed by modern civilization can be regarded as the rationality in the original structure. I don't know if this is a premeditated destruction of modern civilization, or a face-up to its roots.
It's not easy to find a balance of positions for this kind of film, so the far-fetchedness in many places still makes people uncomfortable. However, whether such artistic processing is suitable or not, the viewing experience itself will be memorable.
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