The Sacrifice
All actors and roles (10)
Short description
Alexander is an intellectual and former actor living on a Swedish island with his family and friends. During a celebration for his birthday, the group learns that a nuclear war has begun. Faced with the prospect of global destruction, Alexander attempts to prevent the catastrophe by offering a personal sacrifice to a higher power, promising to give up everything he loves in exchange for peace.
Directed and written by Andrei Tarkovsky, this drama is the seventh film in his career, following Nostalgia. The movie features a cast including Erland Josephson, Susan Fleetwood, Allan Edwall, Guðrún Gísladóttir, Sven Wollter, and Valérie Mairesse. It was a joint production between the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, and the Soviet Union, involving companies such as SVT and Film4 Productions.
The film earned 1 million USD at the worldwide box office. It is well received by viewers, holding a 7.8/10 rating on IMDb from 35,000 votes and a 7.7/10 rating on TMDB based on 636 votes. Professional critics gave the film a higher score of 8.4/10 from 43 reviews.
What's left behind the scenes
- The scene of the house burning was filmed twice – the first time, the Arriflex camera's intermittent mechanism failed, and the film stopped. The house burned down for nothing. A week later, the house set was rebuilt, and the shooting was done again. This time with three cameras.
- The postman Otto, as a character in the painting, is a kind of tribute from Tarkovsky to one of his regular acting talismans, Anatoly Solonitsyn, who died of lung cancer in 1982.
- For the final scene, Tarkovsky made the following demands regarding the weather: it had to be cloudy; it would be good to have white, fluffy clouds and for the sun to suddenly appear. The effect seen in the frame is precisely this: the sun reflecting in the water and heavy white clouds crawling across the sky.
- Tarkovsky spent several days searching for a location for the scene of the atomic catastrophe, the panic. He found it, and it was a tunnel, a staircase, and a small square in front of them. That's where this terrible and beautiful scene was filmed. And shortly after, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was killed. The killer stood in the very place where the camera was during filming.
- The film's aesthetics significantly influenced Western intellectuals. For example, the music video for the American rock band “R.E.M.’s” song “Losing My Religion” contains direct quotes from the film and repeats its visual style.
- The film's idea was taken from the screenplay “The Witch” by the Strugatsky brothers.
- During filming, cinematographer Sven Nykvist long couldn't understand why Andrei Tarkovsky was constantly looking into the camera. He was even offended until Andrei explained to him that, only by looking through the camera lens, he could visualize the mise-en-scène.
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