Sacrifice: celebrity-stuffed eco-satire takes aim at the virtue signalling of wealthy elites

• Reviewed from the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival 

The Gods must be appeased: every year the festival circuit brings forth a few glossy, high-concept debacles suitable for public scapegoating. This year’s model – and make no mistake, this movie belongs on a runway – is Sacrifice, which, as scripted by director Romain Gavras and his co-writer Will Arbery is designed to reflect the likely circumstances of its exhibition. Watching a gaggle of well-intentioned and better-coiffed A-list celebrities walking the red carpet at Toronto International Film Festival in order to introduce a movie that opens with a gaggle of well-intentioned and better-coiffed A-listers walking the red carpet creates a sort of mise-en-abyme – the right effect for a satire mapping humanity’s collective downward trajectory. 

“Make The Earth Cool Again” reads the slogan of a massive, glitzy environmental benefit event being held in Greece under the watchful eye of bald-pated tech-bro billionaire Bracken (Vincent Cassel). He’s a smooth operator whose company name – Poseidon – speaks to his deity-like self-regard; meanwhile, the word “cool” is pulling double duty here. The ostensible theme of the summit is ecological activism. Its most (in)famous attendee, action-movie star Mike Tyler (Chris Evans), is more preoccupied with clout chasing than climate change. 

Mike is coming off a very public breakdown that compromised his box office potency and made him a pariah; he wants to use Bracken’s event as a (re)-launching pad for his career. Unfortunately, his idealism (and insecurity) gets the better of him: Railing righteously, if inarticulately, against the host’s hypocritical deep-sea drilling initiative, he turns himself into viral meme fodder before the dinner course.

Under normal circumstances, Mike’s outburst would be the big story of the night, but he’s upstaged by something more startling: a co-ordinated, paramilitary-style takeover by a group of apocalypse-mongers led by the elfin Joan (as in D’Arc), played by Anya-Taylor Joy, now a young veteran of teflon, scourge-the-rich satires partially created by the makers of Succession (2018-2023). Whatever else one can say about The Menu (2022), its neo-Buñuelian shtick felt controlled; Gavras – last seen throwing his hat in the all-time long-take arena with Athena (2022) – is an almost fetishtically undisciplined filmmaker, and crams together so many different visual ideas and styles (Östlund-esque cringe; sub-Gilliam surrealism; McKay-style hectoring) that the cognitive dissonance of the entire enterprise (which is luxuriously photographed by Matias Boucard) almost becomes fascinating in and of itself. The same goes for the casting: if you’ve ever wondered what it would look like if Charli XCX, Salma Hayek and Yung Lean wandered into an (open) bar, well, now you have your answer. 

Inevitably, Joan’s plan involves shanghaiing Mike to serve as – you guessed it – a sacrifice on behalf of all mankind, an offering into the mountain that’s burbling ominously a few miles away. Think Joe Versus the Volcano (1990) (the screenwriters certainly did). The joke, which is not necessarily a bad one, involves a status-conscious do-gooder prevaricating in the face of the ultimate potential redemption narrative: the question is whether Mike is willing to take the plunge if he can’t scroll through the social media hosannas after the fact. The other question is whether Joan and followers are simply deluded, and while there’s nothing wrong with playing quixotic Gen-Z idealism for laughs, Sacrifice is finally too slick and preening to work up any real sense of anxiety over issues of personal or collective accountability. In the end, vain, cowardly, Mike proves to be more Captain Planet than Captain America – but it’s all for naught; the movie proceeds directly to the memory hole.