THE SACRIFICE GAME - Mark Reviews Movies

The Sacrifice Game, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 7, 2023

On one side, there's a boarding school, mostly empty for the winter holiday but serving as a temporary home for a teacher and two students with nowhere to go. On the other, there's a quartet of vicious murderers, moving toward the school and killing along the way. There's a sense of dreadful inevitability at the start of The Sacrifice Game, so it's quite the pleasant and twisted surprise how the screenplay by director Jenn Wexler and Sean Redlitz finds a few key ways to, well, surprise us.

The story is set at some point in the 1970s and in some remote part of a bitterly cold area, so without doing much of anything in terms of plotting or characters, Wexler already evokes several solid ideas. A first, of course, is that there's no way for the group at the school to find or call for help when that inevitable moment arrives.

They only have each other, with the rest of the students and faculty and administrators safe and cozy at their respective homes. Considering the period, it's not as if making a phone call is practical, with killers stalking their prey, or even possible, when the offices are presumably locked for the season. It's not as if the teacher or one of the kids can use a non-existent cellphone, after all.

A second is that group of murderers, whose ruthless tactics are made clear in an opening scene. They're waiting outside a nice home, where carolers are serenading a couple from the porch. They wait for the scene to clear, approach the house, and knock on the door. Wexler's camera keeps getting closer, and then, it rotates around the exterior of the house, watching as the four murderers force their way inside, slit the man's throat, and chase his partner into the kitchen, where someone's knife makes some brutal, final moves into her torso.

With the story's setting in mind, we're reminded of the so-called Manson Family, of course, but this group has some motive that removes the cruelty of their real-life inspiration and prevents any of this from feeling exploitative. Sure, that opening scene, done as an unflinching one-take that only offers windows as barriers to the horrors unfolding, is terrifying, but it must be. We have to know where this story and these characters are going, what they plan to do, and how helpless a single teacher and two kids will be to stop any of it.

The teacher is Rose (Chloë Levine), who has volunteered to spend her holiday break at the all-girls school with two students who don't have a place to go home to at the moment. Samantha (Madison Baines) stays because her stepfather has decided to do something else after the recent death of the girl's mother. The other kid is Clara (Georgia Acken), whose winter residence at the school is practically a given for reasons that eventually make a lot of sense—within this film's strange logic. The only other visitors are an unseen security guard and Rose's boyfriend Jimmy (Gus Kenworthy), the school's chef.

As for the traveling murderers, they're a dirty, unkempt, and eclectic bunch. Jude (Mena Massoud) is the de facto leader, because he's the one most comfortable with the actual killing. Grant (Derek Johns) is a hulking Vietnam vet, who doesn't say much but doesn't need to, either, since he's the muscle of the gang. Doug (Laurent Pitre) has a car, so he's here, too, while Maisie (Olivia Scott Welch) is the glue who holds them all together.

That's because each of three men obviously or secretly wants to be with her, as well as on account of the fact that she has a plan. It involves chunks of marked flesh from the group's victims, a page out of an old book, and the school. We'll leave it at that.

Actually, a lot of what specifically happens here should probably be held back at this point. Much of the wicked fun of the tale is how, when, and why information is kept secret and gradually revealed, characters who seem unimportant to the story return and ones who would appear to be vitally important make sudden exits, and the tables turn on the whole scenario.

Wexler generates plenty of suspense in the build-up to the inevitable confrontation, when the killers show up at the school on Christmas Eve and the school's three isolated residents are unprepared for the invasion, simply by means of desolate setting and the chill air inside and beyond the school's walls. The only rules here are that the killers mean business, the potential victims are in a hopeless spot and can only survive moment by moment by way of smart choices, and we shouldn't become too attached to anyone—even if a character might seem to be a primary protagonist or villain.

Yes, that makes the film quite uncomfortable, especially because there are two kids involved in and witnessing the awful things these killers do, but Wexler and Redlitz's script is playing a secondary game alongside the murderers' dreadful one. As the pieces of the puzzle and the true nature of a dark ritual involving the killers' trophies assemble in front of us, it becomes clearer and clearer that the filmmakers know exactly how far they can take this material without making it seem as unnecessarily cruel as its antagonists are.

Plus, the real trick here is how The Sacrifice Game becomes a story of old-fashioned—ancient, in fact—comeuppance. It's a neat trick that pays off, thanks to Wexler's firm command of atmosphere and suspense and knowing when to release that sense of catharsis, as well as surprise.

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