Sacrifice Movie Review
Director Romain Gavras's Sacrifice is a bizarre film with a very interesting premise. It follows a young radical named Joan (Anya Taylor-Joy) and her siblings who worship volcanos. When their mother dies, they believe that they must sacrifice three people, according to an ancient prophecy, to avert a potentially world-ending disaster. As part of their mission, Joan and her gang of eco-warriors hold a climate change gala hostage and kidnap three of its attendees for their sacrificial ritual. One of the three happens to be an egotistical movie star named Mike (Chris Evans), who suffers from frequent nervous breakdowns following the recent passing of his father. Sacrifice has fascinating ideas about climate change, environmentalism, performative activism, and what it means to be a true hero. However, the superficial writing keeps the film from reconciling its high-concept satire with believable character writing. Gavras treats it as a springboard to deliver a message to the world and forgets to tell a compelling story. Worse yet, despite its pretense, the film fails to offer any meaningful commentary on environmentalism itself.
Director: Romain Gavras
Cast: Chris Evans, Anya Taylor-Joy, Vincent Cassel, John Malkovich
Streamer: Lionsgate Play
The screenplay never allows for full immersion into the story. For example, Joan is an eco-zealot who thinks her mission is to save the world from a volcanic eruption. Her cult stems from her family's isolated scientific research. However, during the hostage situation, she asks everyone to surrender their phones. You would expect someone of Joan's ilk to have little idea about how the world functions, judging by her fanatical belief in an age-old prophecy, but the screenplay treats her with a sense of sophistication that belies her belief system. Further, the film fails to establish the depth of Joan's drive for radicalisation and explore her moral complexity. The environmentalism element is merely a tangential aesthetic background here.
On the other hand, Chris Evans plays the only other reasonably interesting character in Sacrifice. This is a man full of contradictions. Mike attends the climate change gala to regain his waning image as a film star, but he is also knowledgeable enough to call out virtue signalling and the performative nature of Hollywood. In one clever sequence, he criticises the gala mastermind, Ben Bracken (Vincent Cassel), for his hypocrisy in endorsing a form of oceanic abuse to save Earth, even as the planet suffers from an abuse of a different kind. However, Mike's transformation towards the end feels way too sudden. The film does a better job of using him for punchlines about the environment and Hollywood performativity, eliciting some of its genuinely hilarious sequences in the process. It also treats the three figures at the heart of the story as mere symbolic archetypes— the ‘Hero,’ the ‘Zealot,’ and the ‘King’—instead of presenting them as fully fleshed-out characters.
The performances redeem the film to some extent. Evans is a hoot as a hero who takes his film star persona way too seriously, although the actor struggles to convey the depth of his emotional vulnerability thanks partly to the screenplay. The actor's deadpan expressions offer some big laughs in a film that spends too much time delivering monologues for the audience. Mike has his inner volcanos that consume him before he finds his ‘true calling' with the literal one. Meanwhile, Anya Taylor-Joy's wonderfully expressive face alone convinces you of Joan's fanaticism and the actor performs her role with aplomb, although the screenplay fails to provide her with enough to dig deeper. This Joan needs a better arc. The ideas may pop occasionally, but the characters do not really erupt as much as the volcanos.
Ultimately, Sacrifice suffers from a shallow exploration of its themes. By the end, you would wish that the sacrificial jump into the volcano had come sooner.