The Sacrifice

Offret
The Sacrifice

At the dawn of World War III, a man searches for a way to restore peace to the world and finds he must give something in return. The director's last film, made as he was dying of cancer, The Sacrifice is Tarkovsky's personal statement, a profoundly moving, redemptive tragedy steeped in unforgettable imagery and heart-wrenching emotion.

Reviews

The blend of midlife crisis and existential terror is reminiscent of the films of Ingmar Bergman, but Tarkovsky makes it a world of his own. His images have a transcendental glow and a hieratic poise; alternating between contemplative distance and moral confrontation, they assert, in the most radical sense, the high cost of living—the unbearable price of earthly delights. 

 

Richard Brody

New Yorker

As The Sacrifice comes full circle, returning to that spindly tree by the sea and its nurturing, the film itself emerges as a symbolic gesture of great emotional impact.

 

Kevin Thomas

LA Times

It is brilliant and audacious, with one of the most extraordinary final sequences in modern cinema, and all in a manner which Hollywood in the succeeding decade would learn to call “high concept”. But it is more complex and ambiguous than it appeared at the time: its tragic meaning has darkened and clotted with time.

 

Peter Bradshaw

Guardian
The Sacrifice

Thoughts

A man plants a dead tree with his young son on the shore of a Baltic island and tells him a story about watering it every day. Later, at his birthday gathering, news arrives that ends the ordinary world. What he does in response is a private transaction: he offers everything he has, his house, family, speech itself, in exchange for the morning coming back.

In the other films in this season someone takes on in some way another person; here a man attempts to take on the whole of humanity, which is either the ultimate form of the impulse to save, or its derangement. Maybe both. 

Narratively there are no dissolves, no signals, nothing to tell you where the dream begins, so the sepia passages and the devastated street sit at exactly the same level of reality as the birthday lunch, the whole film turns on an event that may not have occurred. This is where the permission Bergman took in Persona arrives at its furthest point, which is fitting: The Sacrifice was shot by Bergman's cinematographer on Bergman's Baltic with one of Bergman's actors, and the light in it is unmistakably the same light. 

A man gives up his voice here, a boy who has had almost none until now finds his.