There are many reasons to believe that the end of the world is near. Some who feel that way advocate for action to stop climate change, repentance, or any number of other measures that might help keep the planet alive for a bit longer. And then there are those who think they know how to stop it, not through science or reason but through the fulfillment of a prophecy. Sacrifice follows the intersection of such true believers and members of the one percent who couldn’t be any further away in life experience and ideology.
Mike Tyler (Chris Evans) is not in a good place. He publicly embarrassed himself with a meltdown at the premiere of his latest movie, and now he’s the laughing stock of a climate conference being hosted in a mine spotlighting an obscenely rich man, Braken (Vincent Cassel), who believes he has found a way forward. It just so happens that a local doomsday cult led by Joan (Anya Taylor-Joy) has received word that the world’s end is imminent, and they’ve shown up to this conference to find three critical figures to throw into a volcano to stop it from happening.
This film comes from director Romain Gavras, whose last film was the action-packed, breathless Athena. This film, despite sharing some themes of inequality and urgency, feels radically different and far less polished. This cult goes to great lengths to infiltrate this high-security gathering of very rich people, but they’re not interested in wanton death and destruction, merely the retrieval of the necessary trio to export to the volcano. It’s a typically loose portrayal of an impeccably and impossibly well-organized group of lawbreakers who can somehow outsmart everyone around them while following the supposed words of a volcano without questioning it.
Sacrifice is a satire, but it’s also many other things, and the problem is that it’s never clear which is most important. Mike is going through something and so detached from how people see him that he doesn’t even notice that the entire group is being held at gunpoint when he wanders back into the main ballroom after a trip to the bathroom. He’s ready to rant and rave against society and unwittingly cosigns the cult’s manifesto without realizing how outlandish it sounds. The notion of a dance being able to save the world, as the conference organizers profess it might, is another absurdity that feels all too realistic when it comes to performative activism from those who could actually accomplish something if they tried for real change rather than symbolic gestures.
Whatever this film is, it does feature well-cast leads in Evans and Taylor-Joy. After hanging up his shield and costume as Captain America, Evans is branching out to other roles, and while this one is a degree purer than the corrupt priest he plays in Honey Don’t, he’s still hardly a saint, and it’s clear that he’s having fun digging into this celebrity’s self-serving personality. Taylor-Joy returns to TIFF with a movie not too dissimilar from The Menu, but her role has shifted, and she balances the humor in her line delivery very well, ensuring that each impassioned proclamation she delivers lands just slightly wrong, revealing cracks in her belief system even if she’d never deliberately let anyone else see them.
Sacrifice is bold in scope and vision but ultimately ends up all over the place rather than headed towards a focused conclusion. There are many ideas and supporting characters who prove entirely inconsequential, like Salma Hayek Pinault as Braken’s wife and Charli xcx, seen at TIFF in a much more even experimental film, Erupcja, as a musical performer. There’s definitely something here that’s interesting, but rather than the uninterrupted, hypnotic chaos of Athena, this feels like a melding of many things that just don’t coherently go together. There’s much to think about but not enough to concretely take away once the credits roll.
Movie Rating: 5/10
