Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sacrifice’ on VOD, a Scandinavia-set Creeper That Tries to Squeeze Us With its Lovecraftian Tentacles

Now on VOD, Sacrifice — not to be confused with The Sacrifice, Sacrifice (2019), Sacrifice! or Hellblade: Sanua’s Sacrifice — deploys the descriptor du jour of recent horror movies: “Lovecraftian.” Whether this movie is worthy of hailing the mighty Cthulhu himself or just some less-great Great Old One (like that Tsathoggua — what a putz!), I’m not sure. But it does feature a nifty performance from Barbara Crampton, the horror icon of From Beyond, Chopping Mall and Re-Animator fame. Now let’s see if she and some Shub Niggurath-ish fella make compelling co-stars.

SACRIFICE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: NORWAY, PROBABLY A FJORD: A woman at a sink washes blood from her hands. She awakes her young son. They hop in her car and D-R-I-V-O-F-T. Some years pass, like 20 or so of them. A big mountain looms in the frame. Eerie, queasy music tells us it’s not just any big mountain, but a big, intimidating mountain. A boat cuts across the water. Isaac (Ludovic Hughes) and Emma (Sophie Stevens) are in it. She leans over the side and chunders. Maybe she heard the queasy music. More likely, she’s got motion sickness, or she’s just pregnant, which she is, and one of the primary things pregnant women in movies do, besides scream while people tell her to PUSH!, is throw up.

Anyway. Isaac and Emma make their way to the house where the woman washed the blood and woke up her son and etc. The dried blood is still in the sink. Isaac is the boy from the earlier scene, and, since time has passed inexorably and rendered him an adult, he’s older now and has inherited the place. The plan is to sell it and go back to the States and have a baby and never think of Norway again, except when they put on Mayhem’s De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas record. But all the creepy camera angles and off-putting musical cues they encounter upon checking out the house tell us that getting in and out of Norway quickly isn’t going to be so easy. They find a photo of Isaac and his mom and late father. “I almost forgot what he looked like,” Isaac says sadly.

Isaac makes friends with a couple local dudes at the local bar of this provincial town, gets stumbledrunk. The next day, a knock at the door. It’s Renate (Crampton), the local cop. She rather indelicately tells him his mother killed his father, and that’s his blood right there on the floor under Isaac’s bare feet. She then invites them over for dinner, where she introduces the couple to her very quiet local daughter Astrid (Johanna Adde Dahl) and explains how the locals worship the local folk deity of local myth known as The Slumbering One — aha! Now we know why the local denizens always say “Sleep well” as a salutation, knowing damn well that ain’t gonna happen — and then invites them to a local shindig she’s holding tomorrow that’s called something with a lot of umlauts and k’s in it. Isaac is increasingly open to acclimating to local Midsommar traditions and customs, and the ceremony involves wearing hoodie cloaks, saying “thee” an unsettling number of times in loud and reverent tones (as in “O MIGHTY SLUMBERING ONE, I CALL TO THEE”) and being quasi-baptized in the freezing f—ing local fjord.

Emma does not take well to all of this, especially some of those seaweedy The Lighthouse vibes and Isaac’s sudden desire to stay in Norway and never go back to the U.S. They argue a lot and he goes out and drinks with the locals and behaves erratically and stands transfixed beneath the aurora borealis as he watches Astrid emerge like a wraith from the cold, cold water, a wraith that’s very much not even clothed at all. Shit’s getting weird here, folks. Mighty weird.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It’s like Midsommar with a lot of the interesting bits taken out, then crossed with The Lighthouse and some of the dark-comedy tones of Rosemary’s Baby.

Performance Worth Watching: I loved Crampton’s wonderfully terrible Scandinavian accent, and the little quirky affectations she gives her character, beneath a sheen of accommodating friendliness.

Memorable Dialogue: Isaac and Emma eye a strange scarecrow-totem thing on Renate’s lawn.

Emma: “Well, that’s the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Isaac: “Creepier than my dad’s corpse stain?”

Sex and Skin: Very very much not even clothed at all.

Our Take: There are far too many instances of overstylized color in this movie to portend anything but the way the cookie crumbles: Remember the old adage, when you find yourself being bathed in pink, blue, yellow or green, LOOK OUT, maybe it’s time to hop a plane back to Schenectady or whatever. That isn’t to knock Sacrifice filmmakers Toor Mian and Andy Collier for indulging some style, but the direction feels tentative, as if they’re afraid to nurture the kooky tone or general outrageous originality that lifts a film like Midsommar — really, it’s the most obvious comparison — to the top of the heap.

It’s all just a little tepid — the characters, the situation, the atmosphere and the themes, what I could find of them, anyway. Besides Crampton’s endearingly odd presence (maybe still not odd enough!), a little pregnancy paranoia (done far more effectively in A Quiet Place) and a bit of seaside-atmospheric mystical mist, the film’s some thin chowder — stabs at comedy seem underdeveloped, it overuses the it’s-only-a-dream rug-pulling trick, fails to truly invoke Lovecraftian dread and doesn’t really deliver the type of knockout climax it needs. Maybe it’s not fair to compare it to recent bigger-budget horror benchmarks, but so many scary movies did a lot more with a lot less. CTHULHU SHRUGGED.

Our Call: SKIP IT. There’s too much ambitious horror-thriller fodder out there — Amulet, Nocturne, His House, The Invisible Man, just off the top of my head — to give your time to this type of middling stuff.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream Sacrifice