A Sacrifice

This movie is 96 % talking....not character development talking, not building a plotline talking, just talking. Randomly. There are many conversations that goes no where and does not enhances the story.

Motivation: The movie never establishes the motivations to make people do what they do. They make decisions to satisfy the story without letting us know why they are making that decision.

Direction/Acting...in the few scenes that do contain some level of drama, the actors overact the scene which means yelling, gesturing loudly and walking out of rooms.

Lastly...boring. The first 20 minutes did little to pique my interest and even make me want to finish the movie. I should have gone with that instinct and saves myself 90 minutes of my life.

Eric Bana and Sadie Sink sulk their way through Berlin Nobody, a drab cult thriller given the far less tantalizing title "A Sacrifice" for North American distribution. Bana is an American professor in Berlin working on a complicated thesis about cult mindset and dangerous groupthink, unaware that his teenage daughter (Sink) is slowly orbiting the very same deadly cult via a German boy (Jonas Dasser) she's started seeing. Bana is a brilliant actor who doesn't always choose the best scripts and this is unfortunately one of them, Stranger Things' talented Sink also falling into the same trap. They try to do honest character work but the writing lets them down hard, attempting some complex thematics regarding the cut angle that get left completely open ended like they just gave up in fully exploring their ideas and let the credits roll. Skip.

Well I just got done watching this movie and I feel like I've seen this movie before because I have seen this movie before.

Positives for A Sacrifice (2024): The performances from Sadie Sink and Eric Bana are pretty good for the most part. I did have some investment in what was happening in the story. And that's about it for positives.

Negatives for A Sacrifice (2024): Like I said before, this is a movie and a premise that I've seen many times before and it's plays out the exact same way as those other movies. It also feels like this movie could've been directed by anyone and yet it was directed by Jordan Scott, the daughter of legendary filmmaker Ridley Scott.

Overall, A Sacrifice (2024) is as generic as these cult thriller movie can get and nothing new is brought to the table.

The movie touched on some cult recruitment practices and attempted to address the why people get sucked into groups with some slightly on the nose dialogue dressed up as academic banter.

Unfortunately I'm familiar having directly experienced a real cult and it's terrifying groupthink. The use of psychedelics is a cult trope but mostly not the case. Maybe the cult this was based on used them but that's a generally held misbeleif. It doesn't take much to suck the unguarded in. We're social animals and crave community and acceptance.

None the less it did expose some cult standards. Being made to feel special. Group acceptance. False dilemmas to instil fear and compliance. A sociopathic cult leader. Etc.

From a movie/narrative perspective the story was a little flat and one dimensional. A splash of colour should have spruced it up visually. Sub plots were thin and the twist foreshadowing tipped its hand.

Eric did a good job as did his co-stars but I had the feeling they weren't buying the dialogue here and there. Still it was watchable and there wasn't that feeling you'd just wasted two hours of your life.

I just wish it had that extra something.

Started out interesting, halfway through, it fizzles out altogether! I'm a bit disappointed. Eric Bana usually has better taste in the movies he decides to be in. I understand cults are stupid but couldn't they just pretend to be something believable? The premise of greed ruining our world and a common collective consciousness are doable and thought provoking but as soon as Eric's daughter gets taken the whole theory and their acting goes straight down the toilet. Do better guys you've got the ability, I just know it!

Ok, it says I need a few more words so maybe I should just keep talking about how stupid this is?