Sacrifice Review: Romain Gavras' Wealth Satire Pulls Its Punches

Romain Gavras' Sacrifice, which premiered at TIFF 2025 and opens on Netflix on October 16, wants to skewer the ultra-rich. It mostly sends them flowers.

The film premiered as a gala at the Toronto festival, where every big name in the credits drew hoots from the audience. The Film Stage's review notes that context matters: a satire of celebrity worship, watched in a room worshipping celebrities, "couldn't help ringing a little false."

The plot is brisk enough. Hollywood star Mike Tyler (Chris Evans) hits a career slump after a public meltdown. He seeks redemption at a black-tie climate charity dinner in Greece. The guest list includes tech billionaire Bracken (Vincent Cassel), who borrows the language of environmentalism to pitch extracting more resources; his ex-musician wife Pinault (Salma Hayek); and Charli XCX, briefly, as a pop star covering Cerrone's "Supernature" — the track Gaspar Noé used in Climax.

Then the dinner goes sideways. A youth eco-terrorist group led by Joan (Anya Taylor-Joy) and her brother (Yung Lean) seizes the event, framing their aims through folklore. Joan claims Mother Earth speaks to her directly and demands a sacrifice: three rich people into a volcano, to avert a coming disaster. Mike, wrestling with self-loathing, plays along — and finds their delusions may hold more than meets the eye.

What works in Sacrifice?

Taylor-Joy, in a word. The review calls her performance "magnetic" and "undeniably Sacrifice's highlight." It is a shame, the critic adds, that more screen time goes to Mike's "rather lame arc and Evans' milquetoast presence."

The verdict on Evans is dry but pointed. It's easy to admire him for trying in his post-Marvel career. It's also hard not to notice the self-awareness that has "forbade him from being much of a compelling actor."

What about Gavras behind the camera?

Gavras, a veteran of the past decade's glossiest music videos and a couple of genre features, has a great eye. The film, per the review, "is never not a pleasure to look at." Looks, however, are the ceiling.

The satire itself is "surprisingly flat." Danger, mania and — crucially — humor "never really rise to the occasion." The eco-terrorists' costuming references the liberation group from Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend, an ambitious visual nod. The actual politics, the review finds, are threadbare and punch-pulling.

The reason sits in the structure. At heart, Sacrifice is a conventional redemption narrative, and its movie-star entry point functions as "showbiz-elite crocodile tears than it would like to admit." The film is too sentimental and not acidic enough, because it "can never really bear itself to bring down the world from which it's borne."

The closing argument

The review ends on a bitter turn. If the film feels like "an unfunny inside joke," perhaps that mirrors reality: it "can't bring itself to make the actual sacrifice and solve the problem."

Audiences can weigh that verdict themselves on October 16, when Sacrifice arrives on Netflix — ideally, per the review's own logic, somewhere quieter than a gala premiere.