TIFF Review: Chris Evans and Anya Taylor-Joy in Sacrifice

The last few years have seen a glut of “eat the rich” films—and TV shows—and Romain Gavras’s Sacrifice is another of the type. Co-written with Pulitzer-nominee Will Arbery, Sacrifice follows a clash of the rich and the idealistic, perhaps at the end of the world. Movie star Mike Tyler (played by a particularly hirsute Chris Evans) is attending a ritzy fundraising bash in Greece for a company that, ironically, posits they have found a new energy source to save the world, but it requires mining the ocean floor to obtain it. A billionaire’s eco-corp claiming to save the world by way of environmental devastation has too clear a ring of truth to it, but not all of Sacrifice’s deliberately meta ideas work so well.

Mike is making a comeback after a year-long break following an on-set meltdown that went viral in which he, an actor most famous for playing a franchise hero, screams that he is “not a hero”. Accompanied by his agent (Sam Richardson), Mike is trying to at least LOOK like he’s turning over a new leaf, but mostly he’s worried if his hair plugs are indistinguishable. (Evans was most certainly cast because he is an actor most famous for playing a heroic role, but Sacrifice does not touch the rumors of Evans’ own follicle enhancement with a ten-foot pole. This film really picks and chooses its battles.) Also at the party are billionaire CEO Braken (Vincent Cassel), along with his wife, Mrs. Braken (Salma Hayek Pinault, the wife of an actual billionaire CEO. No, the film does nothing with that “coincidence” either), and Katie (Ambika Mod), the most normal person in the room.

The fundraiser is interrupted by a group of eco-terrorists led by the eerily elfin Joan (Anya Taylor-Joy), who, like Joan of Arc, has heard a divine message to save humanity. Except Joan’s divine god is mother earth, and the message is to chuck three people into an active volcano to prevent an oncoming extinction event. Taylor-Joy does her usual thing of combining her cartoonish beauty with steely determination, and she’s as good as ever at it. At times, her performance feels a little warmed over, simply because she keeps getting cast as characters like this and nothing about Sacrifice asks her to go outside her wheelhouse. Evans, on the other hand, gets to go back to his comedy cupboard and pull out a fun, self-involved performance. He’s not breaking new ground, either, he’s just so damn enjoyable as Comedy Chris it boosts his performance.

Romain Gavras previously directed the striking French action film Athena, and he has also made a bunch of music videos, including for the likes of DJ Mehdi, M.I.A., and Jay-Z and Kanye West, so it is no surprise that Sacrifice looks incredibly gorgeous (here Gavras is aided by cinematographer Matias Boucard). The film includes an especially eye-popping musical performance from a fake popstar played by real life popstar Charli XCX (the scene retroactively shows how bad the “Vesta Sweetwater” scene is in Megalopolis). It’s one of the best sequences in the film. Even as the film begins to falter in the back half, the visuals remain stunning. 

The chief issue for Sacrifice is that it ultimately doesn’t commit to its own premise. A lot of the casting seems like deliberate nods to the real world, done so that we draw specific parallels between the film and reality. There are also catchy slogans that evoke real world propaganda, and Joan is an intense young Scandinavian environmentalist, seemingly a nod to Greta Thunberg. But for all that the film pokes at real correlations, thematically it never really goes there. Sacrifice is big on style and intention, but thin on follow-through. It is a film that stars a real billionaire’s wife as a billionaire’s wife, after all, and a film which premiere party was hosted by Gucci—this is not a film that ultimately wants to upset the status quo, as everyone involved benefits from the status quo. 

For all its big ideas, Sacrifice amounts to nothing more than cinematic posturing, though to be fair, many of the “eat the rich” films fall into this trap. Some, like Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice, acknowledge that maintaining the status quo can be a deliberate choice in and of itself, but Sacrifice feels less deliberate and more cowardly. I can’t help but wonder what Sacrifice would look like if it starred nobody actors and wasn’t produced with the aid of British production company Film4, which is owned by a state-run media company. Is there a bolder version of this film that could exist? Or is Romain Gavras’s central preoccupation with style always going to trump theme? That wasn’t an issue in Athena, though that film does have the same top-heavy narrative balance in which the first half of the film is better than the second half. I just wish Sacrifice lived up to its own promise, and that the story matched the film’s tremendous cast and bold style.