In short: The Sacrifice Game (2023)

Christmas 1971. A quartet of serial killers – psychopathic Jude (Mena Massoud), quiet muscle Grant (Derek Johns), semi-professional follower Doug (Laurent Pitre) and secret mastermind Maisie (Olivia Scott Welch) have literally cut a path through quite a few religious weirdos, cutting away parts of their skins carrying very curious looking birthmarks for what they call a “flesh puzzle”.

On Christmas Eve, they end up in a boarding school for girls, where one teacher (Chloë Levine), and two girls – Samantha (Madison Baines and Clara (Georgia Acken) have been left behind over the holidays. Maisie was once at the school herself and was thrown out when she dabbled in the occult, as so often happens at boarding schools. Not without taking a page of a magic book from the cellar library with her that contains the ritual she and her gentlemen friends are attempting to follow; a ritual that is supposed to summon a demon. Now, only the blood of innocents drawn at the school is left, and the ritual should be finished.

Obviously, things don’t go as smoothly as these four nincompoops expect. Turns out, Maisie has only ripped a part of the ritual from the book before she had to leave school, and has thusly misunderstood the nature of what she’s trying to achieve rather badly.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter Jenn Wexler’s The Sacrifice Game certainly isn’t. Subtlety, depth and complexity aren’t this film’s game (sorry). Instead, this is all about the fun of seeing various trope-heavy characters and ideas collide and enjoying the sparks that fly.

Thankfully, Wexler’s direction is focussed and stylish – with a particularly fine sense for the use of Christmas colours and those connected to 70s cinema - and the script by her and Sean Redlitz fast-paced and fun, with a couple of scenes – particularly early on in the film – that demonstrate admirable control over the language of suspense and thriller material. The film does get a little less impressive during its final act, as usually happens once a movie like this comes to the phase where contemporary screenwriting rules demand explanations and “twists”, something that’s by now so expected, I always find myself yawning a bit at the structurally not at all surprising “surprises”. Detailed explanations the film at hand would have worked without, as well, but this is, alas, how the sausage is made right now.

This shouldn’t overshadow how fun a little Christmas-set horror movie this is otherwise. I’m just an old man yelling at clouds tonight.

Three Films Make A Post: Some Rides Should Never Be Shared

The Ranger (2018): I’ve read quite a few good things about Jenn Wexler’s throwback slasher, and it’s certainly a better film than many another of this particular genre by virtue of not being crap. However, while it does do a couple of half-clever things, it never quite comes together for me. The slashing and the violence isn’t impactful enough for my tastes, the psychological underpinnings not quite sharp enough, and the titular Ranger never feels like anything but a movie psycho who talks too much. It’s still perfectly serviceable but I have to admit I expected something more/deeper from it than it delivered.

Ride (2018): This, one the other hand, directed by Jeremy Unger, promises to deliver some sort of psychological cat-and-mouse game between a not-Uber driver (Jessie T. Usher), a passenger (Bella Thorne) and another passenger who turns out to be a manipulative sociopath (Will Brill), but keeps the psychological tension too loose for much too long, spending the first half of what is a pretty short running time on nearly desperate attempts to be An LA Movie™. So we get the name dropping, the place dropping, and way too much insipid small talk I can only hope isn’t actually what’s going on in not-taxis in LA. This, again, isn’t a terrible film, but it is trying so hard to be meta-clever one, it misses out on simply being a good one first.

Murder Party (2007): Whereas this film about a lonely guy who stumbles upon what he thinks is an exclusive Halloween party but quickly finds himself victimized by a bunch of would-be artists planning to kill him FOR ART, is indeed meta and clever, actually meta and clever. It’s an often outrageously funny bit of the darkest comedy that climaxes in more blood and gore than I would have expected coming in. On the way, it satirizes a certain kind of poseur artist, people who make fun of poseur artists, itself, and stories about people getting sacrificed for art.


At the same time, Saulnier also manages to portray these rather broad characters and their relations in a curiously kind and believable way, somehow mocking them without feeling cruel. And nobody’s talking about his guest spot on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. either.