The Sacrifice
Offret
Synopsis
News of WWIII breaks out during the festivities of drama critic Alexander’s birthday celebration. With the end of the world nigh, he turns to God and vows to renounce everything near and dear to him, if the war is averted.
Our take
The great Andrei Tarkovsky (Solaris, Stalker) passed away at 54 after an all-too-short career. The Sacrifice, completed while he was dying, is one of cinema’s greatest swansongs: a visual tour-de-force, and a heartbreaking goodbye from a father to a son.
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Awards & Festivals
Cannes Film Festival
1986 | 4 wins including: Best Artistic Contribution
BAFTA Awards
1988 | Winner: Best Foreign Language Film
What remain are some of the most haunting moments of the director’s career: The sudden and uncanny desaturation of the film’s image—courtesy of master cinematographer Sven Nykvist—as Erland Josephson roams his estate in a nuclear daze; the flickering TV test pattern reflected on the family in tableau; the film’s breathtaking denouement, which never ceases to terrify me. These are the images I return to again and again.
James Stroble
January 15, 2016
…Tarkovsky’s other work of exile was his haunting, supernatural-tinged last film The Sacrifice (1986), shot on the Swedish island of Gotland, and not in his native language. It looks at times like a Bergman film – not surprising given he enlisted Bergman’s brilliant cinematographer Sven Nykvist.
Carmen Gray
October 28, 2015
Tarkovsky’s seventh and final film requires of a contemporary audience a contemporary forfeit—for the film to work, for its duration all distractions must be kept at bay. In a way, this is also the challenge facing Alexander (Bergman’s Erland Josephson), once an actor and these days a theatre critic who’s frustrated with the uselessness of words.
Elina Alter
November 12, 2014
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Melancholia
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Fail-Safe
Sidney Lumet, 1964
The Road
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The Steamroller and the Violin
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Last Night
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Solaris
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The Mirror
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Andrei Rublev
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966