The Killing of a Sacred Deer

• The film won the Prix du Scénario (Best Screenplay) at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, tied with Lynne Ramsay for You Were Never Really Here — not Best Director, as sometimes misremembered.
• The opening domestic scene has Anna Murphy (Nicole Kidman) ask Steven if he wants "the usual" — a roleplay where she goes still and silent as if under general anesthesia. It's simulated foreplay, not an actual sedation on set.
• Much of the film was shot at The Christ Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio; Colin Farrell attended a real quadruple-bypass surgery to prepare for his role, later describing the experience as intense and recalling the smell of burning flesh.
• Cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis — Lanthimos's regular DP on Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster and later The Favourite — shot the film on 35mm Kodak stock using ultra-wide-angle lenses (10-17mm) with slow zooms to create its clinical, detached look.
• The title comes directly from Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis: Agamemnon must sacrifice his daughter after killing a deer sacred to the goddess Artemis, the same forced-sacrifice structure the film transplants into Steven's household.

Martin is not supernatural but psychosomatically weaponizing the children's symptoms through Munchausen-by-proxy dynamics, and the 'curse' resolves because Martin believes it will once a sacrifice is made—making Steven's final choice a capitulation to a teenager's delusion that the entire family absorbs.

The film operates as a medical guilt allegory where Steven's sin isn't the dead patient but his emotional absence from his own family; the children's paralysis manifests as literalization of how this household already moves through life without genuine feeling, and the curse simply makes the existing numbness visible.

Martin is Steven's actual illegitimate son, not just a surrogate. The father-son language they use, Martin's mother's fixation on Steven, and the specific demand that Steven kill his own child mirrors the myth of Iphigenia because Martin is demanding Steven choose between two children he sired—one acknowledged, one hidden.

Steven Murphy, a cardiothoracic surgeon with a pristine family and a dead patient in his past, has been quietly funding the teenage son of the man who died on his table. The boy, Martin, wants a father figure—or maybe a reckoning. When Martin's affection curdles into a curse, Steven's children begin losing the ability to walk, then to eat. The terms: someone in the family must die to restore balance. Lanthimos strips the Greek myth of Iphigenia down to surgical steel and suburban dread, forcing a man who plays god with hearts to choose whose heart stops beating.