The Killing of a Sacred Deer opens on the tightly ordered life of a surgeon named Steven, whose carefully built routine starts to unravel the moment a teenage boy he has taken under his wing begins asking for more than gratitude.
What is The Killing of a Sacred Deer about?
Steven, a successful cardiologist, has quietly folded a teenager named Martin into his family's life, inviting him to dinners and treating him almost like a son. As the relationship deepens, Martin's behavior shifts from grateful to unsettling, and he begins making demands that put Steven's wife and two children in the path of consequences neither of them saw coming. Director Yorgos Lanthimos builds the film's dread through flat, deliberate dialogue and long, controlled camera moves, letting an ordinary suburban household curdle into something closer to Greek tragedy than conventional horror.
About the cast
Colin Farrell plays Steven with a rigid calm that slowly cracks as the family's situation worsens, opposite Nicole Kidman as his wife, whose own composure is tested from a different angle. Barry Keoghan gives Martin an unnervingly polite stillness that carries much of the film's tension, while Raffey Cassidy and Sunny Suljic play the couple's children, caught in a crisis they can't fully understand.
Context & significance
The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a British-American-Irish co-production that pairs Yorgos Lanthimos's precise, deadpan style with a story loosely inspired by the ancient myth of Iphigenia, in which a father is forced to weigh an impossible sacrifice. The film sits at the intersection of horror, drama, and dark psychological thriller, using stilted line readings and clinical framing rather than jump scares to unsettle the audience, and it arrived as one of Lanthimos's most divisive works among genre viewers.
Watching The Killing of a Sacred Deer on Ktime
The Killing of a Sacred Deer streams on K-Time with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, giving Farsi-speaking viewers a fully localized way to watch. A free K-Time account login is required to press play; the film's page, cast list, and details can be browsed without signing in.