At the end of Sacrifice, a radical warrior (played by Anya Taylor-Joy), a disgraced actor (Chris Evans), and a pragmatic billionaire (Vincent Cassel) trek up an active volcano on a remote Greek island to be, well, sacrificed.
There’s plenty of chaos leading up to the volcano. In the film, directed by Romain Gavras (Athena), cult leader Joan (Taylor-Joy) and her devoted followers disrupt an environmental charity gala to take three unlikely hostages — including movie star Mike Tyler (Evans) and tech mogul Ben Bracken (Cassel) — for a sacrificial ritual they believe will stop an extinction-level event.
What unfolds is a transformative adventure through stunning Greek terrain, from a flowing river to an underground cave and up a fiery mountain. Many members of the core ensemble end up dead by the end of the journey. For Gavras, who co-wrote the movie with Will Arbery (Succession), killing off several of the key players was a fitting way to wrap up their epic quest.
“I kill my A-list cast in the film, but the world is saved,” Gavras tells Tudum. “I like this [bittersweet] emotion of feeling like we won the war, but we lost a few friends along the way.”
So who dies? And what does their sacrifice really mean? Keep reading to unpack that mind-boggling ending to Sacrifice.
The movie ends with a leap of faith straight into a volcano — but not everyone makes the sacrifice willingly. That includes billionaire Ben Bracken, who fights for his life right up until he’s tossed in kicking and screaming.
Joan, on the other hand, is a staunch believer in the cause. She stays the course even as doubt creeps in when a test of faith, which she calls a “goat run,” doesn’t go as planned. During this test, Joan and Mike race to escape her father Gunnar’s (John Malkovich) underground bunker as arrows are fired at them. Joan believes the magic of the volcano will protect them as the chosen ones, but she ends up with an arrow in her hip, which leaves her shaken. Later, at the volcano’s peak, Joan’s faith is reassured — she sees a blood moon in the sky, just like a vision she’d had. So she embraces her death with a smile and three final words: “For the fire.”
“I don’t see many other people who could have carried that character with so much strength and sensibility,” Gavras says of Taylor-Joy’s performance. “It’s almost like everyone’s playing in the divine comedy of a farce, and she is in a different film where she’s earnest and has one objective, one ideology.”
For Mike, the journey starts out as an opportunity to play the hero after falling from grace in a public scandal. In the end, the pilgrimage to the peak becomes his salvation. With a rescue chopper hovering above to carry him to safety, and another helicopter nearby capturing everything on live television, Mike places his hand in the dirt to listen to the volcano like Joan did. Then he dramatically leaps into the lava. His final act serves as his greatest performance, and according to Gavras, it’s all genuine.
“He actually hears what Joan has been hearing throughout the film and finds some kind of truth within himself,” Gavras explains. “But he also knows that the camera is going to amplify whatever he’s feeling and whatever he’s wanting to achieve.”
Evans was the ultimate collaborator, Gavras said, an actor eager to unpack his own fame. “I think it’s amazing to have someone of that caliber willing to go that far in terms of storytelling and in terms of playing with his own persona,” says Gavras.
Though Joan’s tactics might be considered unconventional, especially to those attending the celebrity-packed gala she hijacks, there’s a method to her madness. Three individuals are chosen from the crowd to meet their destiny by the next red moon for the good of the Earth.
As the youngest in her family, Louise (Jade Croot) must choose the “king” who carries power. Braken, considered the richest man in the world, certainly fits the bill and is selected as one of the three to be sacrificed.
Arthur (Yung Lean) fixates on Katie (Ambika Mod) as his true love after watching her perform at the event as “Daughter Nature.” Eventually, it’s revealed that his real love is someone else entirely.
The problem with commandeering a charity event filled with self-serving elites is that it’s difficult to choose a hero from the group. Thus, Joan concludes that the people must choose, and the person with the loudest applause shall be the hero. Mike emerges from the bathroom to a standing ovation, unaware that his peers are voting for him to be sacrificed.
What’s an epic adventure without a few deaths along the way?
The first sacrifice happens accidentally in a cave. When Arthur gets Katie alone, he tries to woo her with a dead bird that has flowers jutting from its heart in a grotesque bouquet. That, of course, doesn’t go over well. Katie frees her bound wrists with a shard of glass, and she raises the glass to warn Arthur to stay away from her. But she inadvertently slashes him in the neck. Arthur bleeds out in Joan’s arms, and Katie escapes to safety. His body is then burned in a grim ritual. The twist? Arthur’s true love was really his sister Joan, who takes Katie’s place as the second sacrifice.
Later, while high on psychedelics, Joan reveals to Mike that she killed her mother just before her group took control of the charity gala. And the journey ends with Ben, Joan, and Mike dying in sacrifice to the volcano.
And there’s one more to add to the body count: Gunnar. The film’s credits show his body burning — just as Joan instructed before her death.
It’s unclear what exactly happens after Ben, Joan, and Mike die in the heart of the volcano. Was Joan right about the world ending, or was this simply a story she told herself long enough to believe it? That, Gavras says, is up to the viewers to decide.
“You can have your own interpretation of the ending, and this is what makes it interesting,” he says.
Gavras chooses to believe that Joan was right all along, even if the world has become too cynical to believe in myths. “I think we’ve all lost faith,” he explains. “The new gods are the tech moguls who tell us technology is going to save the world when they very much know that it’s going to doom us. And we all know it.”
“It’s a weird thing where we know it’s going to push us to our doom, but the performance around it is very potent,” Gavras adds. “I feel like we’ve tried everything. We’ve tried every political system, we’ve tried every religion. I don’t think technology is going to save us. So maybe if we throw the right three people in a volcano, the world is going to be a better place. Who knows?”
Stream Sacrifice now, only on Netflix.
