The Sacrifice (1986)
Written and Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
Starring Erland Josephson, Susan Fleetwood, Allan Edwall
Runtime 2 hours and 29 minutes
New 4K Restoration debuts in theaters October 25

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

You’ve gotta be a real cinema sicko to vibe with Tarkovsky. His movies are LONG, full of people delivering philosophical and spiritual monologues, composed of countless unbroken longshots which bring the pacing down to a crawl, and quite frankly, there isn’t one among the lot of them that isn’t a bummer. Even his forays into science fiction–Solaris and Stalker–are grim affairs that, despite their genre set-dressing, are Tarkovsky through and through. All of this to say that while I count myself among the Tarkovsky sickos, it’s almost impossible to recommend his movies to people in good conscience. For instance, if I’m doing a work meeting ice breaker this week and someone asks what the last movie I saw was, I am NOT saying The Sacrifice. It’s just not worth getting into it. Even hardcore film nerds are forgiven if they find Tarkovsky to be just too dull. I get it. Which isn’t to say that I don’t want more people to bear witness to the transcendent beauty of Tarkovsky’s filmography, just that the stamina required to make it through one of these is often a Herculean effort, and I get it if it’s not your jam.

That said, The Sacrifice–the cinematic capstone to Tarkovsky’s career–requires more patience than any of his films that came before it. The film is equal parts family drama, as a Swedish family comes to grips with the onset of World War III and the impending nuclear holocaust, and equal parts avant-garde fable. It’s nearly two-and-a-half hours of characters delivering those aforementioned philosophical monologues, almost all of them about death, which makes a lot of sense given that Tarkovsky succumbed to cancer months after the film’s release. This is one of those films made by a great filmmaker who knows the end is near. Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, and Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband all belong in this category. Hardly anyone gets to go out on their own terms, so when it happens, the results are usually pretty special.

Speaking of Bergman, the most remarkable thing about The Sacrifice is that it is essentially Tarkovsky making a Bergman film. Or Bergman making a Tarkovsky film. That sounds weird until you watch the credits and see the film was shot by Bergman’s cinematographer Sven Nykvist and stars frequent Bergman Collaborator Erland Josephson (Scenes from a Marriage, Cries and Whispers, and the aforementioned Saraband which offers a lovely bit of cinematic symmetry). Tarkovsky also used one of Bergman’s production designers and one of his kids served as a camera assistant. All of this on top of the film being shot in Sweden, in Swedish, with a Swedish cast. The result is jarring and likely the subject of a thousand film criticism essays about viewing Tarkovsky in the context of Bergman. Even the mysticism and spirituality that have always played a part in Tarkovsky’s films rise to Bergmanesque levels here. No one made movies where people have one-sided conversations with God quite like Bergman, and Tarkovsky effortlessly taps into that vein here. Like I said, for sickos only.

On its face, the film’s story is incredibly simple. World War III breaks out, a man makes a deal with God to restore the world at the cost of giving up everything dear to him, and when it happens—either via waking up from a dream or suffering some sort of psychotic break—he burns the house down and gets carted off to the hospital as a raving madman. The house burning down is the climactic scene of the film, but it’s not a spoiler since it’s the enduring image on half of the DVD covers and posters that has ever been released for this movie. In typical Tarkovsky fashion this is all just set dressing for the weighty issues weighing on his mind. Yet where the narrative is a meandering meditation on life, death, and salvation, it’s visually stunning. That should be obvious for a Tarkovsky film, but employing Nykvist to capture all of those muted colors of gorgeous, overcast Sweden in Tarkovsky’s trademark long shots where the camera feels like it is moving imperceptibly, makes the film feel hypnotic. It’s less a movie, more a meditation. Less a narrative, more a poem. That’s high falutin', pinky-pointed-out while sipping tea film snob talk, but how can you not be romantic about Tarkovsky?

That it has taken this long to get a 4K restoration is just wild, if only because anything shot by Sven Nykvist should have had an automatic pass to the top of the restoration heap. The 4K restoration is getting a cinematic release this month and while I’m quite certain it will eschew my neck of the woods, I’m already making a spot on my shelf for Kino Lorber’s eventual 4K blu-ray release.