An emotionally distraught actor tries to recapture his megastar throne, but he ends up becoming the centerpiece of a cultish, volcano sacrifice. This climate hysteria satire has interesting things to say about our collective choices. But there’s bloodiness and profanity aplenty in the flowing lava mix.
Mike Tyler is worried about his future as an actor.
I mean, yes, he’s still leading man handsome. And his name is still on people’s lips. But the current buzz is more about his recent public emotional breakdown, wielding a flamethrower in his undershorts, than it is about his acting roles.
Hey, he was dealing with the death of his father, for crying out loud. Besides, he’s under a lot of strain: He can literally feel the hairs on the crown of his head thinning. Com’on! He’s not ready to take balding father roles at this point in his career.
Mike and his agent, Oliver, have therefore decided that Mike needs to stir up some public goodwill. So he’s heading to this climate change charity gala thing he was invited to.
Yes, Mike will admit that it’s ridiculous that all these wealthy climate supporters are flying in on private jets, displaying their profligate wealth, eating overpriced hors d’oeuvres while being entertained with performance art dance numbers in an old granite mine wrapped in neon art pieces. But it’s for a good cause: Social media streaming hits are worth their weight in gold … or something like that.
Problem is, things haven’t been going as smoothly as Mike was hoping. Right after getting to the strange-looking event, he gets a call from a producer who’s considering him for a future project. And this guy thinks these sorts of events are akin to “virtue-signaling circle j—” Well, let’s just say his opinion isn’t very positive.
So what should Mike do now? He probably needs to make sure this guy sees him make some sort of statement against this bombastic event while still appearing to support the cause. (Sigh.) An actor’s life is hard.
While Mike starts the process of showing public agreement and simultaneous disgust—while also enduring G-string wearing male dancers shaking their backsides at the audience—another problem takes center stage: Insane cultists rush in.
Yeah. At first, it appears that the heavily armed cultists are part of the act. In fact, the audience of activists cheer when a cultist leader shoots her automatic rifle into the air. But it turns out that these zealots aren’t making an artistic point. They really want the gathered elite to shut up and listen.
They’re actually interested in finding three people—a king, a beloved woman and a hero—to kill in a ritual sacrifice. You heard that right. The cult leader, a woman named Joan, says she’s been receiving messages from a nearby volcano. And her troupe is convinced that a world-ending eruption will happen in three days if they don’t sacrifice three special people and restore the earth’s balance.
Joan believes that prediction so completely, in fact, that she chops off a woman’s hand with a machete to prove her seriousness. Then her heavily armed comrades fan out to find the appropriate candidates.
Mike is chosen as the hero. Curse these leading man good looks!
Now Mike kinda wishes that his male pattern baldness had kicked things up a notch. Man, an actor’s life is hard.
In a way, Mike actually tries to do the right thing. He’s something of a featherbrained individual who has a hard time figuring out what to do. But he connects with Joan and tries to do the right thing by her.
Joan earnestly believes that she’s taking steps to save the planet. So much so, that she’s willing to sacrifice herself if need be.
Ben Bracken is a tech billionaire who’s sponsoring the climate gala. In an effort to protect his wife, he takes steps that put himself in danger.
Someone calls Ben the “Antichrist.” When Ben is grabbed by the cultists, he asks: “What’s the game here? To make Jesus white again?”
Joan and her crew of young cultists (tweens, teens and twenty-somethings) all adhere to a religious, folklore-like belief system where an erupting volcano has apparently spoken to Joan and called for a deadly sacrifice. Joan believes that the chosen sacrifices will be magically protected from harm until they get to the volcano’s top.
Joan asks Mike what he believes in, and he replies that he believes in the power of story to change the world. Joan, however, declares that she believes in the cleansing power of death.
The cultist belief system sprang up from Joan’s Nobel prize-winning parent’s outlandish scientific research. “Like all false prophets, she created myths to answer questions that science could not,” Joan’s father proclaims. Mike calls Joan a goddess.
Ben Bracken’s wife, Gloria, wears a tight gown that displays deep cleavage. Mike has a reputation for having sex with married women. In fact, in the viral video of Mike’s emotional breakdown, the actor screams out crude declarations of what he has done to other men’s wives.
Male dancers wearing trenchcoats and thongs remove their coats and shake their backsides at an audience. Elsewhere, a small group of people is forced to strip down to their underwear and walk out of the mine.
The young woman chosen to be one of the sacrificed trio gets the impression that she was chosen because of her “purity,” and she vociferously proclaims that she is not a virgin. She crudely tries to explain why that’s the case. In a brief ritual, the three sacrificial candidates lay on the ground dressed only in their underwear.
It’s revealed that Joan’s brother is in love with her.
As the movie begins, Joan and her young crew of cultists burn Joan’s mother alive on a fiery pyre. (We later see her father dealt with in the same manner.)
This terroristic crew subdues the gala’s guards and servers with clubs and tasers. They hold a room full of people at gunpoint. Some people are hit in the face with gun stocks. A spokeswoman, trying to calm the crowd, is pinned to a table where her hand is then chopped off by a machete. (We see the severed hand lying on the white tablecloth, pooled in blood.) The cultists plant explosives and detonate them.
During a climate change video, we’re shown a dead and bloodied polar bear. A news reel shows Joan and her crew when they were only children, hunting animals, shooting them and then cutting their prey open and pulling out their entrails. The kids smear blood on their faces.
A young man’s throat is slashed with a sharp object, and he proceeds to fall over and quickly bleed out. The young cultists chase a couple and shoot at them with crossbows. A crossbow bolt strikes a woman in the side, leaving her shirt red with blood. Then someone stiches her open wound together with a needle and thread (the camera watching closely).
Someone is forcibly thrown into the blazing lava of a volcano. Someone else jumps in freely.
The dialogue includes more than 50 f-words and 10 s-words, along with 10 uses of “a–” and a couple exclamations of “b–ch.” God’s name is misused three times. And there are three crude references to female genitalia.
People drink glasses of wine and champagne at the gala event. The sacrificial subjects are given an unexplained “sacred potion” to drink before ascending the volcano for the sacrifice.
Mike has been prescribed a medication for his anxiety. And we see him pop several pills at one point.
Early on, Ben makes a point about using the earth’s own deep-sea resources to help climate issues. But then it’s made clear that he’s driven more by a potentially huge profit than altruism. Mike and Oliver drive up to the climate gala in a “gas-guzzling” limo—and then stop a hundred feet away from the event so that no one will record them in what they were riding.
One of the neon signs at the gala proclaims: “Indigenous woman of color. Period.” During a spur-of-the-moment speech for the sake of social media, Mike asks his audience, “We got tired of raping the Earth, so instead we’ll rape the ocean?”
During a performance art piece, two women representing Mother Nature and her daughter sing about their death. When Joan first looks through the gathered attendees of the gala, she can’t find “the hero” they must sacrifice. “These people are all disgusting,” Joan states. She then prompts the crowd to applaud for their chosen hero, and they ironically applaud heavily for a man in a wheelchair, not conceiving that their “programmed” applause could lead to the man’s death.
Romain Gavras’ Sacrifice is a rare breed of film that blends satire and farce in an effort to draw attention to the ridiculous nature of mankind. This movie declares that we foolish humans tend to look at large problems in our lives and prance about in bombastic, self-important ways rather than actually trying do anything serious about them.
The issue at the core of this film is the global panic over climate change. But really, any of a score of clothes-rending hysterias, crises or global scares could equally fit the dramatic bill. And Gavras suggests that our overwrought ways of addressing our fears—from activists’ online rants to hypocritical posing to cultish insanity—are all responses cut from the same anxious cloth.
“Your world is fake. It’s all fake,” the central cultist, Joan, screams. Her Nobel Prize-winning father calls out, “Where’s the science?” when asked to sacrifice himself for the very causes he espouses. Someone else opines, “These morons believe that they can save nature. But you don’t save it through a picture or a kumbaya ritual.” And later, the film’s ludicrous hero, Mike, gazes in a mirror and declares, “Only I can kill me!”
Those are the messages we’re meant to walk away with from this sacrifice-to-a-volcano sendup. However, due to the way this pic hoists our societal sacred cow of climate change on a lampooning petard, many won’t be patient enough to feel the point.
Even if you do, however, Sacrifice isn’t a film that’s easy to cuddle up with. Yes, there are humorously absurd things to chuckle over here—and satirical points worth pondering. But there’s also face-smearing and flesh-hacking bloodiness to deal with, as well as a steady stream of profanity that’s as hot as a volcano’s lava spew.
I applaud Gavras’ efforts to open our eyes to the choices we make. But I can’t praise what he fills our eyes and ears with.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
