Movie Review: The Sacrifice Game (2023)
Actors Georgia Acken, Madison Baines, and Chloë Levine await their fate in “The Sacrifice Game.”
With The Sacrifice Game, filmmaker Jenn Wexler mixes the seventies, cults, curses, witches, and Christmas into a horror movie with a sly social commentary.
Early in THE SACRIFICE GAME, Rose (Chloë Levine, from THE RANGER), a young and ambitious teacher at The Blackvale School for Girls, gives her class a history lesson about the origin of their town, which was nearly wiped out by a huge fire a century earlier. The founding fathers blamed the conflagration on “an unholy coven of the devil’s witches.”
“But, remember,” says Rose, “history isn’t always what actually happened. It’s what people say happened, what they wrote down at the time, and how others interpret it later.” She asks the class if they think witches are real and singles out the shy and withdrawn Samantha (Madison Baines, THE YOUNG ARSONISTS), who answers, “Witches aren’t real, but scapegoats are. They needed to blame somebody, so why not make up a story about witches?”
Who gets blamed, the subtlety of power dynamics, and how hard it can be for women to hold power in a culture that has a history of burning witches are recurring themes in this consistently creepy, often funny, and always wildly unpredictable horror film. In her follow-up to the cult favorite THE RANGER, director Jenn Wexler uses parallel storylines and a hybrid of horror subgenres to twist genre expectations and tell a story about the games women need to play in a world where the game is rigged, and the only way to win is to sacrifice a pawn to capture a queen and then kick over the board.
Is this a home invasion film, a thrill-kill cult movie, a supernatural thriller, or a Christmas horror story? The answer is “yes.”
It’s three nights before Christmas of 1971. The movie begins with a mesmerizing opening sequence of a deadly home invasion, and it’s a powerhouse display of filmic style and mood. With its interplay of foreground and background action and a sardonic soundtrack (LA Witch’s Kill My Baby Tonight”), the scene initially has a Tarantino swagger but then becomes something darker. With hints of Dario Argento’s TENEBRAE and John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN, the hypnotic, nightmarish single shot tracks around the house’s exterior to catch glimpses of the brutal stabbings through the windows. That glass barrier between us and the victims makes the deaths horribly lonely. The killers’ movements through the house are like a dance; they have done this before. This is a ritual, and this intense sequence masterfully sucks us right into the story.
The Ritual is about to begin, with Olivia Scott Welch leading the chant
It’s a powerful introduction to the murderous quartet known as “The Christmas Killers,” the key characters in one of the parallel storylines. There’s Jude, played by Mena Massoud (from the live-action ALADDIN), who oozes the kind of charisma and self-delusion one needs to be a cult leader; Grant (Derek Johns from Amazon’s THE BOYS), the emotionally damaged Vietnam Vet and the group’s muscle, Doug (Laurent Pitre from CBC’s THE DETECTIVES), the reluctant driver who’s in over his head (and the film’s comedic foil), and then there’s Maisie (Olivia Scott Welch from Netflix’s FEAR STREET), who’s content to orchestrate the gang from the wings slyly and let Jude take center stage. When we see the quartet driving country backroads in an early-seventies Chevelle, older horror fans will be reminded of Krug Stillo and his gang from Wes Craven’s LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, but Wexler and co-scripter Sean Redlitz use this tired group dynamic to subvert it. Instead of the woman being only arm candy for the gang leader, Maisie is the mastermind who runs the show while letting Jude think everything is his idea. She keeps her power by massaging the egos of the rest of the gang, tailoring her alliances. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the first character we see in the movie is Maisie, in the shadows, smoking a cigarette, waiting for the action to start.
Maisie also possesses the rubric of this Satanic cult, pages torn from an ancient book, which are full of cryptic symbols and writings that serve as a map for their murder spree. How Maisie came to have these pages, what book they are from, or why they are slaughtering these people (and slicing what looks like Rorschach birthmarks off their bodies) is not immediately explained. These will only be revealed if we take the joyride Jenn Wexler offers us.
Road Killers: Johns, Massoud, and Welch on a spree.
This leads us to the other parallel storyline, back at The Blackvale School for Girls. And what an intimidating campus it is. Shot on location at the Oka Abbey in Oka, Québec, Blackvale sits atop a snowy mountain and resembles a medieval fortress or a prison with its enclosed courtyard and a central rotunda of hallways that look like cellblocks. It even has a catacomb-style storage basement full of the school’s past. When two characters stumble upon a small makeshift library down there, one of the students describes it as “the books they don’t want us to read.” For a place of higher learning, the only thing it seems to teach is conformity. The students wear dull monochrome uniforms, form cliques, and mock the awkward girls. When news of the real world sneaks into the campus in the form of a newspaper article about the Christmas Killers, the Headmistress tells the girls to ignore it. “There’s no point in scaring yourselves with this tabloid trash.” Blackvale seems less interested in preparing girls to succeed in the world than it is in getting them to accept their place in a system. The school motto may be “Blackvale girls look out for each other,” but it feels more like a call to action as the movie goes on.
It’s the last day of classes before the campus empties out for Christmas Break, but not everyone heads home for the holidays. Samantha, the shy student who sees scapegoats instead of witches, is ditched by her father at the last minute. She’s her father’s scapegoat, having survived a car accident that killed her mother, and she’s banished to this school. Sharing banishment within Blackvale is Clara (newcomer Georgia Acken, in a breakout performance), a stoic, antisocial loner who prefers to be invisible to the rest of the girls, including Samantha. Clara is secretive and, considering the multiple scars on her arms, troubled. Because of their predicament, the Headmistress orders Rose, their young teacher, and her cook/handyman boyfriend Jimmy (Gus Kenworthy, OLYMPIC DREAMS) to chaperone the two during the shutdown. Even though Clara, Samantha, and Rose share outsider status among their peer groups, that doesn’t translate into them becoming fast friends. As Clara says, “I just don’t like to let people in. I’m not very good at human interaction.”
Unsteady alliance: Georgia Acken, Madison Baines, and Chloë Levine
Nevertheless, Rose understands the kind of loneliness Christmas can bring for people abandoned by family (and accolades to Chloë Levine, who sells so much empathy with just her eyes), and she’s determined to get Samantha and Clara to sit down and enjoy a Christmas Eve dinner together with her if it kills her.
Unfortunately for them, there’s a knock on the door, and on the other side of it are the Christmas Killers. They’ve been guided to the school on this holiest of nights by Maisie and her visions. Blackvale is their final destination, and the location holds the final bloody piece to a murderous, unholy puzzle. They are here to complete their ritual with one last sacrifice, and the halls of Blackvale will run red.
To say any more would be to spoil the game within THE SACRIFICE GAME and miss out on the clever twists that Wexler and Redlitz have built into the second half of the movie. Suffice it to say that there are a few surprises that play on your expectations around genre tropes without detracting from the horror at the heart of the film. Wexler pulls no punches on the carnage; there is a ruthlessness to the violence that will appeal to diehard fans. Yet the director is able to inject sardonic humor without it being distracting, thanks to the wonderful performance of Laurent Pitre. Doug is the ineffectual, skeptical fifth wheel and the relief we need when Mena Massoud’s Jude gets too high on his dark messiah complex. Massoud’s role is a balancing act; he’s a merciless, cold-blooded killer, yet he’s also a vapid egotist who runs on charisma over substance.
The movie benefits from solid acting throughout, with accolades to both Madison Baines and newcomer Georgia Acken. It can be risky to put teens in lead roles (which is why so many genre films use twentysomethings instead), but these two work well off each other. It’s a gamble that pays off during a few scenes where knowing the actors are adolescents increases our discomfort at their peril. In fact, some of the creepiest moments of the film come from close-ups of the faces of the actors, not special effects.
Mena Massoud gets into the spirit of things.
The cinematography by Alexandre Bussière deserves praise for evoking the early 70s without falling into parody or overdependence on nostalgia. Whereas Wexler’s THE RANGER went for a Lisa Frank-meets-CBGB visual style, Bussière goes for the muted browns, greens, and blues of 70s cinema, which makes the reds pop when things get grisly. But most importantly, he and Wexler create a consistent sense of isolation, oppressiveness, and dread. Even bright winter mornings become ominous when he shows Samantha jogging through the woods from above, and the shadows of the trees look like skeletal hands reaching out for her. Most importantly, he turns Blackvale itself into a character. The building is a series of bare walls, winding halls, and dark tunnels, a labyrinth that hides all of its secrets underground. It is a repressive institution that instills a rigid system into girls while they are young. Jenn Wexler creates a world where women are the majority, but most of the women buy into the institution that stifles them, and they even help propagate it.
It’s interesting that the only people who care about the Blackvale school motto, the only ones who repeat it like a litany, are the four women who are the outsiders, the misfits, the ones who don’t fit the system. Each of them, Samantha, Clara, Rose, and Maisie, has been figuratively sacrificing something to try to beat the game in their unique ways. Each of them rebels against the system from a different moral axis, so when they meet, sparks fly, and all hell breaks loose.
Jenn Wexler’s THE SACRIFICE GAME is a creepy horror film that looks like a classic rock album on the surface, but once you give it a spin and get a dose of the humor, social commentary, and outrageous finale, you realize it was punk rock all along.
THE SACRIFICE GAME IS AVAILABLE ON SHUDDER AND AMC+
THE SACRIFICE GAME: 99 minutes/color/2.39:1
Starring Mena Massoud, Olivia Scott Welch, Chloë Levine, Madison Baines, Georgia Acken, Gus Kenworthy, Derek Johns, and Laurent Pitre
Directed by JennWexler
Written by JennWexler and Sean Redlitz
Produced by Heather Buckley, Philip Kalin-Hajdu, Albert I Melamed, Todd Slater, and Jenn Wexler
Original Music by Mario Sévigny
Cinematography by Alexandre Bussière
Editors Mathieu Bérubé and Arthur Tarnowski
Production Company: Amg Music Film Television
Distributor: Shudder