The Economy of Justice: The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Understood less as an adaptation of Euripides’s tragedy, than as a commentary on the impossibility of tragedy in white Western bourgeois modernity, The Killing of a Sacred Deer can be seen to elaborate a radical critique of lawful violence that is close to Agamben’s and Walter Benjamin’s. The shift from sacrifice to killing already apparent in the title marks a similar shift from the universe of drama to our modern predicament in which, as Agamben has argued, tragedy is no longer a viable paradigm for ethics. The film, I argue, maintains the Sadean sexualisation of violence and domination that is typical of Lanthimos’s cinema and combines it with a reflection on sacred life and the performative power of the oath. The operations of power in The Killing of a Sacred Deer are presented on the model of the action of a surgeon on the body of a patient under anaesthesia and of an archaic and instrumental force of law. Unlike in previous films, the ending does not offer an uncertain liberation or a suspended gesture, but a return to violent order that anticipates the cynical hopelessness of Lanthimos’s following films.