‘Sacrifice’ Review: Chris Evans and Anya Taylor-Joy Lead a Climate Satire That Turns Darker as It Goes

Along with Digger, Sacrifice could make up a rather peculiar and specific double feature about climate change and planetary collapse. Romain Gavras’s film predates Alejandro González Iñárritu’s by nearly a year — it premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival — but the two share their subject matter, their format, and even certain characteristics, including a gradual shift from comedy to drama, from satire to something approaching tragedy. Both films also have highly personal, immediately recognizable sensibilities. And both, unfortunately, have enough problems to keep all of those elements from adding up to anything particularly worthwhile.

The urgency behind both films is essentially the same: to sound the alarm about a catastrophe approaching at breakneck speed, one that the world’s most powerful and wealthiest people are not only doing nothing to prevent but actively making worse. The difference in Sacrifice is that, supposedly, everyone here is trying to “save the planet.” The problem is that they’re doing it more to protect their public image than out of any genuine concern. Chris Evans plays Mike Tyler, a movie star going through a professional slump who, in an attempt to rehabilitate his image, attends an event on a Greek island with a collection of celebrities, billionaires and other assorted VIPs, all ostensibly gathered to raise money for environmental causes.

It doesn’t take long to realize that the whole thing is an elaborate exercise in greenwashing, organized by a billionaire named Ben Bracken (Vincent Cassel), who presides over the proceedings alongside his wife, Gloria (Salma Hayek Pinault, given very little to do). In a tone reminiscent of Ruben Östlund — particularly The Square, though later also Triangle of Sadness — Gavras unleashes a parade of bizarre activities, musical numbers (one of them featuring the ubiquitous Charli XCX) and pathetic, ridiculous characters. That includes Tyler himself, who is constantly monitoring his public image. He wants to be seen as one of those politically conscious actors who publicly champions causes that he may not actually care all that much about. He’s intense, naïve and, above all, spectacularly gullible.

But then everything blows up when a group that initially appears to be staging some kind of performance at the event turns out to be an “eco-terrorist” organization with some very unusual plans. Led by Joan (Anya Taylor-Joy), this small army of young activists has decided to kidnap three people from the gathering for a peculiar purpose that is gradually revealed and has to do with the group’s bizarre, almost cult-like philosophy. And so, by majority vote, they take Mike, Ben and one of the performers (Ambika Mod) onto a boat headed toward a volcano that is about to erupt.

The film from the director of Athena — yes, he’s Costa-Gavras’s son — co-written with playwright Will Arbery, gradually moves away from the more conventional parody of its opening section, a fairly straightforward send-up of billionaires and their phony commitments, toward something darker and increasingly strange. Joan — the name is hardly a subtle choice — her eccentric and somewhat confused followers, and their increasingly agitated captives find themselves caught up in a series of ever more peculiar situations. Suffice it to say that, at one point, John Malkovich shows up in a bizarre role, which should give you some idea of the movie’s general wavelength. From there, the film moves from the dreamlike to the political and eventually to the tragic, throwing in action sequences, chases and some spectacular views of the landscape and the erupting volcano along the way.

It’s never entirely clear where Gavras wants Sacrifice to go, nor does the chosen format or narrative trajectory ever quite make sense. It’s the story of an actor who gradually begins taking seriously the cause he has attached himself to, and of an honest activist whose plans are nevertheless pretty outlandish, as she tries, in her own way, to confront powerful people whose primary concern is protecting their businesses. But it’s also a story about how virtually everyone involved in this particular ecosystem behaves in ways that are, at best, bizarre and, at worst, completely incomprehensible.

Much like Digger, the film may have something genuinely worthwhile to say about the world we live in, but its approach is confusing and largely ineffective, with more missteps than successes along the way. There’s a sense that cinema doesn’t quite know how to deal with these subjects without turning everything involved into some kind of exaggerated satire. But it doesn’t have to. The problem is right there in front of us. And the traditional forms of storytelling are still the best — and most effective — ways to talk about the fate of the planet.