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20-10-2025 Vol 19

TIFF Review: Romain Gavras’ Sacrifice is a Pop Satire That Falls Flat

It’s not too grand a statement to say the environment you watch a film in will heavily impact how you feel about it. This was the case with Sacrifice, a supposed satire of the uber-rich and celebrity worship that, viewed in the context of a film festival’s gala world premiere where every big name in the credits was accompanied by hooting from the audience, couldn’t help ringing a little false. 

The film’s primary access to the one-percenter world is Hollywood star Mike Tyler (Chris Evans), who is facing a career slump after a public meltdown, and furthermore looking to redeem himself with an appearance at a black-tie charity dinner in Greece for climate-change activism. The other guests include tech billionaire Bracken (Vincent Cassel), who disingenuously adopts the language of environmentalism to actually pitch extracting more resources; his former musician wife, Pinault (Salma Hayek); and, heck, Charli XCX in one scene as a pop star who covers that really killer track, Cerrone’s “Supernature,” from Gaspar Noé’s Climax.

Yet the conference is interrupted by a youth-based eco-terrorist group led by the steely-eyed Scandinavian Joan (Anya Taylor-Joy) and her brother (Yung Lean), who frame their environmentalist aims under folkloric justifications. Joan claims Mother Earth is telling her directly to prevent a forthcoming disaster by throwing three rich people into a volcano as a sacrifice-of-sorts. Wrestling with his increased self-loathing––and maybe even seeing a chance for true transcendence in a spirituality-free celebrity world––Mike plays along with the group, finding out their delulsions may carry more than meets the eye.  

Anya Taylor-Joy’s performance as Joan is magnetic, undeniably Sacrifice‘s highlight; it’s a shame that more of the film is dedicated to Mike’s rather lame arc and Evans’ milquetoast presence. While it’s easy to admire Evans for trying in his post-Marvel career, it’s also hard not to see the self-awareness that’s forbade him from being much of a compelling actor. 

In matters behind the camera, Romain Gavras––a seasoned director of some of the past decade’s glossiest music videos and a couple of genre-tinged features––has a great eye, ensuring Sacrifice is never not a pleasure to look at. But it’s also surprisingly flat on the whole as a pop satire. The danger, mania, and––crucially––humor never really rise to the occasion. For daring to make visual reference to the liberation group from Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend in the eco-terrorists’ costuming, it’s pretty odd how threadbare and punch-pulling the actual politics are. 

Though it’s likely because, at heart, Sacrifice is a pretty conventional redemption narrative, its movie-star entry point functioning more as showbiz-elite crocodile tears than it would like to admit. The film is ultimately too sentimental and not acidic enough because it can never really bear itself to bring down the world from which it’s borne. If there’s a point to which it feels more like an unfunny inside joke than anything, perhaps that’s the grim reality of the world we face: it can’t bring itself to make the actual sacrifice and solve the problem. 

Sacrifice premiered at TIFF 2025.

The post TIFF Review: Romain Gavras’ Sacrifice is a Pop Satire That Falls Flat first appeared on The Film Stage.

Filip

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