In Romain Gavras’ absurd, but not nearly absurd enough, apocalyptic comedy “Sacrifice,” Chris Evans plays a movie star recovering from a nervous breakdown. He’s so desperate to be accepted that he’ll join any cult that makes him feel good about himself. I’d make a joke about Evans returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe but that’s a low blow. Besides, it’s a better career move than making “Sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice” has all the earmarks of a quirky indie with big ideas about celebrity and the environment and religion and how chasing a sense of purpose makes weirdos of us all. There’s an eco-terrorist who wears bunny ears, as if Louise Belcher got carried away on a field trip to a volcano. Chris Evans whips out a flamethrower and torches his own movie premiere. It’s going for eccentric but more than anything it’s just mannered, because it doesn’t believe in its own hokum. It’s too detached to have a point, or even to embrace its pointlessness.
Evans plays Mike Tyler, an actor who returns to the public eye after the aforementioned flamethrower incident. He’s at a big gala in Greece, inside a giant mine, where billionaires and celebrities congratulate themselves on everything they do for the environment, after flying halfway around the world on private jets. Naturally, they’re all taken hostage by nature-lovers with Kalashnikovs, led by cult leader Joan, played by Anya Taylor-Joy.
They don’t want money, they just want three human sacrifices to throw into their live volcano. One of them has to be a king, so the rabbit ear lady abducts a billionaire played by Vincent Cassel. Another has to be a lover, so Joan’s brother selects one of the young entertainers, Katie (Ambika Mod), after Charlie XCX nods in her direction, seemingly eager to flee this film. Joan also needs a hero, and Mike just made a cringe-worthy speech about billionaire hypocrisy, so she chooses him. And since Mike was in the bathroom when the violence broke out he has no idea what he’s signing up for, he just knows everyone finally seems to like him now.
Mike is such an exposed nerve-ending that everything affects him, and he’s willing to believe anything that bolsters his flimsy ego. So when he’s told he’s supposed to save the world by throwing himself into a pit of magma, his first reaction is “huh?” and his second reaction is to be honored. Joan believes the mythology she’s made up, and the script by Gavras and award-winning playwright Will Arbery wants us to believe that maybe she’s on to something. In real life, if someone said you could save the world by throwing three people into a volcano, you probably wouldn’t believe them, but this is a movie, so we know there’s a chance that Joan is right.
The problem is, that’s the only reason we have to believe her. She doesn’t present a meaningful ethos or have a compelling persona, unless you count “being Anya Taylor-Joy,” which does count for something. Mike buys what she’s selling because he’s got nothing else to cling to, but the audience (hopefully) does, so that’s not enough for everybody watching at home. When Lord Summerisle talked about his pagan god blessing his village’s crops in “The Wicker Man” you believed that he believed, so he made as much sense as any other religious leader. Romain Gavras never gives Joan and her cult that much respectability, so we’re forced to entertain the notion that what they believe is real just because, again, there’s a non-zero chance that’s where this movie will end up.
But the apocalypse doesn’t mean anything. There’s nothing Joan is trying to save and there’s no one in this movie who deserves to be rescued. Everyone’s either a superficial jackass, a selfish regular old-fashioned ass, or a cartoon. “Sacrifice” isn’t cynical enough to suggest maybe the world deserves to be destroyed, so its unconvincing characters only bring the rest of the narrative down. And if the point really is that Joan was right, “Sacrifice” doesn’t have much to say about that either. It would mean that there really is a higher power, and one that demands blood, but the film’s views on religion are vague and lack spirituality, leaving “Sacrifice” ill-equipped to address the ramifications of its own story.
All this limp thematic drudgery could be overlooked, or at least forgiven, if “Sacrifice” was funny. Or emotional. Or suspenseful. Or interesting. But the film’s obsession with Mike’s superficiality infects the whole enterprise, making it hard to care about what’s happening or what might happen next. Chris Evans seems eager to nuke his own celebrity image, but the material isn’t deep enough, or wacky enough, to detonate. An early scene finds him reading social media posts about how cringe he is, which is undeniably rude, yet undeniably accurate.
Anya Taylor-Joy fares better, since she gets to actually believe in something, make sacrifices of her own and potentially lose her faith. But Joan exists to facilitate a rich celebrity’s personal growth and further the movie’s plot, not to take over the production and make it her own. How unfortunate. In the end, only Jade Croot, playing the silent and creepy Louise Belcher stand-in named — wait, is her character actually named Louise? Really? I was joking, but maybe the “Bob’s Burgers” reference was intentional the whole time. That would be genuinely kooky, but nothing else in “Sacrifice” is that amusingly odd, so it’s hard to believe the film has that much personality.
Anyway, Jade Croot steals the movie without any of Gavras’ and Arbery’s strained dialogue, which is probably not a coincidence. You can respect Evans and Taylor-Joy for thinking “Sacrifice” was worth making, but it’s a cinematic volcano and throwing them headfirst into it didn’t save anybody. It just dissolved the actors completely away, not unlike the audience’s patience.
Sacrifice is now streaming on Netflix.
