Rent The Sacrifice (1986)

Tarkovskys darkest film - The Sacrifice review by CP Customer

I'll begin this by saying it's Tarkovskys darkest film I've seen, but also equally as beautiful as a film like The Mirror or Stalker, Solaris. We meet Alexander who is planting a tree and relaxing with his son, we then meet the postman called Otto who is a dear friend of Alexanders. What ensues is a lot of vast cinema, we hear hints from Alexanders family that he isn't okay in the head. Then Alexander receives a gift that's mailed to him, we hear hints about his life as an actor etc. we then hear the first mentions of the word Sacrifice and how the gift acts as a sacrifice.

What follows is all out nuclear war and there is a lot of drama where I think the film lost it's touch really, but it does regain it towards the end and some of the final scenes are up there with anything Tarkovskys ever done, so all in all it's certainly worth a watch. If you're going to though I'd recommend you'd watch Solaris/Stalker first, then Mirror, Andrei Rublev, Ivans Childhood and then this one and Nostalgia just to get a general idea of his filmmaking approaches etc.

The End of the World, Very Slowly - The Sacrifice review by griggs

The Sacrifice feels like Tarkovsky doing Bergman at the end of the world. Slow, severe, beautiful, and oddly calming. It sets nature against modern life, with technology reduced to a doom-box in the corner. What stuck with me most is how panic strips everyone back to whatever belief or story they have left. Bleak, but strangely soothing.

Death Wish - The Sacrifice review by Steve

This is an end-of-the-world picture in two respects: it was made by Andrei Tarkovsky after he was diagnosed with a terminal disease and is a personal reflection on a lifetime in cinema and a summation of his late life ideas; plus it's a sci-fi fantasy which imagines a nuclear holocaust through the dream of an older man in decline.

The deeper we get into his subconscious, the more surreal is the director's symbolistic landscape. The sacrifice is the extreme bargaining the academic (Erland Josephson) will consider in order to save his young son, and the whole world. The plotless visual poetry creates sensual expressionism out of light and sound...

There are (apparently) 115 slow tracking shots, leading to the climactic house fire scene which is one unbroken seven minute edit. Sven Nykvist's desolate colour photography is so desaturated that the core of the dream is in b&w. And if this sounds pretentious, then of course, it's the last statement of a complex arthouse legend...

And it's an immersive experience, which breathes in Ingmar Bergman, and breathes out Béla Tarr... Much of the imagery is religious but there is no meaningful redemption. Tarkovsky ends on a long close up of a tree, which evokes the sacrifice of the crucifix. And returns us- says Wiki- to the opening shot of his 1962 debut, Ivan's Childhood.