A Sacrifice

Don't waste your money or time. I try to give movies a chance. I really do. And I never spend the time to rate a movie, let alone comment on it. But this was genuinely just horrible. Atrocious writing. Atrocious directing. Completely unrealistic dialogue and overreactions to everything that leave you rolling your eyes thinking "who freaking really says or does that!" No one is THAT naive. Huge jumps in the progression of the story that ruin the genuineness, I think, of where it was trying to go. Zero character development. Pissed I paid to watch and be irritated almost from the very beginning.

Genuinely awful script and direction that makes you wonder how anyone agreed to pay for any of it. Next time there's accusations of the movie industry being used as a tax break and for money laundering, this will be Exhibit A. Bana woefully miscast, thankfully he gets enough awful dialogue and worse directing to pretend he was trying and blame the mess on others. Sink is actually solid, she's got skills but this train wreck wasn't the vehicle to sell them. Hoetz might have been good, don't know, I get blinded by how attractive she is. Jokes aside, she's fine, but no one gets out of this swamp alive with any dignity intact. Thinking it's far more clever than what it is, it's hard to pull apart the worst offenders. The script, the direction, the editing, the plot beats, the dialogue are all working in harmony to deliver a 'wtf is this garbage' movie experience. Turgid tripe that should never have been made. Just awful.

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.

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.

Ben Monroe (Eric Bana) is a published American psychologist living in Berlin. He is called in to help investigate a cult which has turned suicidal. His daughter Mazzy (Sadie Sink) is coming to live with him. She falls for a charming boy who introduces her to an environmental doomsday group. There is a real lack of intensity in this movie. I've always felt that about Eric Bana, but Sadie Sink's name kinda intrigued me at first. This needs to be a mystery crime thriller. The movie insists on revealing everything and doing nothing thrilling. I run out of patience well before the end, and the ending does nothing to change my mind.