A Sacrifice

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.

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.

6.4 stars.

This film is very well made, but the execution is clumsy. The music is outstanding and I have to comment on it, because it evokes a pretty scary feeling. The acting is tolerable and the direction is wonderful, the lighting and camera work is without fault. Okay, so what could be wrong with this movie if I've just praised every aspect of it? Well, I didn't give any accolades for the script and the story itself. The story is repetitive, and so this is just the same film done a million times, but the only difference for me is that it was done in Germany, which gives it just a smidge feeling of something "different". The script is atrocious and there is no way they could make this a very entertaining film. Some of the characters are not believable and just too weird, so there is no sense of authenticity. It's too robotic at times and wooden at times.

I assume since the setting is Germany that most of the actors are German. However, the two main characters are Americans.

It's a movie about a cult and it's obviously a Satanic one. There are some apparitions and after life visions and odd stuff like that and it's an eerie experience for sure. I think the whole film was done so well, I just wish they had a better script and a bit more originality.

Bana's character is supposedly an absentee father, but unfortunately he was a bit absentee with his acting. I said most of the acting was good, but strangely enough, the Americans left something to be desired. The Germans stole the show.

This film is not quite good enough for me to want to ever see it again, therefore it must fall below 7, but I can't say it's any less than 6.4, because it's a really accomplished presentation outside of the flat script.

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.

The description of the movie plot sounded so mysterious and intriguing! With the the topics of cults & murders, i was expecting an exciting & mysterious movie. Sadly, this is more of a slow-paced drama than a thriller. The first hour was the worst, with no intrigue or mystery building. I'm not sure if it is the story, dialogue or action (or lack thereof) that makes the viewing so darn dull. But it's quite bland. Now admittedly, the last 20 minutes were more exciting, and the last bit does rather make some sense of what you were watching in the hour or so previous. The last 20 minutes, however, is not enough to redeem this movie. Unfortunately, despite the good acting & production overall, the story just falls flat.