A SACRIFICE - Mark Reviews Movies

A Sacrifice, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 27, 2024

Writer/director Jordan Scott's A Sacrifice isn't much of a mystery, since its condensed plot and some ahead-of-the-game performances telegraph exactly where its story is heading. Where does that leave this thriller about cults and how prevalent group-think can be in the modern, technology-driven world? It turns out, unsurprisingly, without much to do or say otherwise.

Some of the material is at least intriguing thematically, as we watch a man who studies human psychology and sociology on a theoretical level ignore a perfect case study unfolding right under his nose. The sociologist is Ben Monroe (Eric Bana), a transplant to Berlin from California after a messy separation from his wife. Ben was too caught up in his own work, researching and writing a book about loneliness that has become a bestseller even outside academic circles (an optimistic thought, that), to notice his marriage slipping away.

To avoid and forget that painful result, he's now obsessed with writing a follow-up tome about the human desire to be part of a community and how that can be pushed to extremes. He'd be a good subject for a book about people who should know better about flawed behavior but maintain the pattern anyway, and Bana is maybe a bit too charming and sympathetic here to give this character that edge of self-absorbed ignorance.

The plot, though, is split between Ben and his teenage daughter Mazzy (Sadie Sink), who has come to Berlin to spend time with her father and a semester at a local school. Through mutual acquaintance Max (Stephan Kampwirth), Ben is introduced to Nina (Sylvia Hoeks), a forensic psychologist, and a crime scene where multiple people took cyanide in a ritualistic mass suicide. Such a scene is the inevitable end for the phenomenon Ben is researching, but as he keeps doing his work and starts spending more personal time with Nina, the social scientist misses that his own daughter might be being pulled into such a community.

Mazzy's story is far more straightforward. She meets Martin (Jonas Dassler) on a train from the airport, strikes up an easy conversation with the young man, and starts spending time with him. He's a lonely guy, especially after finding the grandmother who raised him, after Martin was orphaned as a child, dead on the floor. He has no real friends, apparently, but Martin is part of an environmentalist group led by Hilma (Sophie Rois), who tells the grieving young man that the activist collective is his new family now.

It's pretty easy to see exactly where this is going, since the screenplay (adapted from Nicholas Hogg's novel Tokyo) only seems interested in its protagonist as a way to establish exposition, its sociology angle as a means of explaining a villainous plot, and pretty much every other character as a broad, bland archetype of dangerous obsession. Hoeks is chilling here as the group's leader, which is part of the problem from the very start. Sure, there's something a bit disingenuous about turning concern for the environment into the motive for a sinister and oddly self-defeating cult, but that's not really the issue.

It's that Hilma's attitude is clearly ominous from her first appearance, telling us everything we need to know about how the story will unfold, how it connects to Ben's specific research, and what's in store for Mazzy as she gets closer to Martin. There's another performance here that gives away yet a different revelation, although much of that comes from Scott's strange decision to fracture the story's focus.

Indeed, it's so divided that one specific scene feels out of place to such a degree that it practically screams the answer to a question we haven't even had a chance to ask. Its placement within the plot's timeline makes the already-confounding chronology of the story's ultimate revelation—which, again, isn't much of one by that point—seem even less likely or, for that matter, probable. Of course, such details would matter a lot less if the movie showed any interest in or care for its ideas about cults—how they can pull in otherwise ordinary people with promises for meaning in their own lives and a sense of purpose beyond any one individual's actions.

Instead, A Sacrifice uses such insidious manipulation as a plot device and that way of thinking as the gears that barely keep the story mechanics moving. The whole affair becomes about the plot, which doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, and its underlying secrets, which are repeatedly undermined by the movie's form. There are a few decent ideas here, but none of them matters more to the filmmakers than trying to be a basic and, hence, humdrum thriller.

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