Director: Romain Gavras
Writers: Will Arbery, Roman Gavras
Stars: Chris Evans, Anya Taylor-Joy, Vincent Cassel
Synopsis: A celebrity-filled environmental benefit is disrupted by a group of eco-terrorists.
Sacrifice opens with an environmental charity gala in Greece that assembles a group of A-list guests. You’ve got the action star (Chris Evans), the Jeff Bezos-inspired billionaire (Vincent Cassel), the pop icon (Salma Hayek Pinault, fabulously channeling Madonna), and the fun-loving Charli xcx-type pop star (Charli xcx herself, in a fun cameo). Everyone comes in with an agenda, fight climate change, naturally, and use the camera-laden event to shift the media narrative that surrounds their celebrity status. Anya Taylor-Joy’s Joan and her cultish group of friends take the gala hostage with an agenda of their own—take three of these attendees to be sacrificed to a near-by volcano on the cusp of erupting, doing so will prevent the end of the world.
Evans plays Mike Tyler, made famous by a Gladiator-esque epic, and he’s ready to put his action star days behind him. He comes to the event preoccupied—his hairline is rapidly thinning and he’s being ripped apart on social media for a recent, very public meltdown. There’s something so delightfully cheeky and fun about watching movie stars play obnoxious, obtuse celebrities in a satire making fun of out-of-touch celebrities and the public’s willingness to give these same people endless attention and affirmation.
Evans tears into this material with a fervor. The parallels to his superhero past are obvious, but this is so much more than an actor playing a heightened version of themselves. Evans packs his character with an earnestness and vulnerability that is fascinating to watch and unpack. Fresh off The Materialists, Evans turns in another career-best, and wildly different, performance here, tapping into an evolving and underappreciated range as an actor, and elevating the film when the rest of Sacrifice falters.
Taylor-Joy is the other standout in Sacrifice. She is a woman on a mission, but also finds herself charmed in the presence of Hollywood charisma. Her defenses are down, and Taylor-Joy plays this duality between conviction and tenderness, and very well. There’s a raw honesty that Taylor-Joy brings to her work in Sacrifice, that again, makes the film recommendable.
Sacrifice is a film carried almost entirely by the very, very good performances of its cast. Though with the exception of Taylor-Joy and Evans, the actors are underutilized. With Cassel, there’s more to explore with his winking-devil of an almost-villian. But, he’s reliably great. Sam Richardson is hilarious playing a Hollywood agent trying to save his top client. John Malkovich pops up as Taylor-Joy’s father, doing quite a lot with not much to work with.
The characters eventually move away from this satirical set up and here is where Sacrifice struggles. During the post-screening Q&A, co-writer Will Arbery said that the film’s satire acts as a trojan horse for something deeper. Fair enough. The problem is that the satire is the very best part of Sacrifice and the film loses steam in the back-half when it leans away from those elements, getting lost in the semi-baked mythology of its wacky doomsday cult. Arbery has Succession among his writing and producing credits, and it feels like Sacrifice is a film that wants to operate on that level, but the film is never quite as clever as it wants to be, and the deeper meaning it’s searching for comes up a bit shallow.
Still, Sacrifice is a good enough movie. It’s so close to being a great one. The cinematography from Matias Boucard and setting provide for some striking images. Director Romain Gavras has his moments of flourish where the style and substance come together quite nicely. Sadly light on moments of much-needed tension, Sacrifice does have plenty of humor. There’s fun to be had which makes the sacrifice of our precious movie-watching minutes, ultimately worth it.
