The Sacrifice Game

The Sacrifice Game is set in 1971 over Christmas break at the Blackvale Academy, an all-girls boarding school. During the break, two girls—Clara and Samantha (Georgina Acken and Madison Baines, respectively) stay at school, while the other girls go back home to visit their families. One of the teachers, Rose (Chloë Levine) stays with the girls and acts as a friend for the two.

Samantha, in particular, is having a rough go of it. She never wanted to go to Blackvale. Her dad shipped her off after her mom died and now he’s MIA in her life. She feels lonelier than she ever has before. Clara, though, is cut from a different cloth. She never goes home. She’s cold, distant, and a little strange. She cuts herself and mutilates her body.

Outside of the school grounds, a Manson-like group of young people are on a murder-spree. They’re following instructions from a book and finding people from around town that had a mark on their torso, murdering them, and cutting that hunk of flesh off. They need to fit all these pieces together, to summon a demon, which just so happens to reside at Blackvale Academy.

If this all feels a little too neat and coincidental, it is. Nothing happens just by chance in The Sacrifice Game, written by Sean Redlitz and Jenn Wexler and directed by Wexler. The script is a well-oiled machine that is fascinating to watch in its intricacy. The plotting is complex, but never in a self-congratulatory way that feels smugly pleased with its own cleverness. The Sacrifice Game is having too much fun to spoil it with arrogance. It wants us to join in on the fun with it.

When the two casts of characters meet, the results are predictably bloody, but then the movie takes a tonal shift of pure, wicked merriment. Wexler delights in setting up scene after scene, like a series of dominos, and seeing them get knocked down in an ornate network of blood and guts. Nothing is ever quite as it seems and when the full vision is fully revealed, it’s much more interesting than we were led to believe.

The setting of The Sacrifice Game, at an empty school, blanketed with snow, conjures up images of The Shining, in all its desolate loneliness, but also had me thinking of it as a more macabre version of The Holdovers, albeit with a demonic twist. I have no other elegant way of saying it, so I’ll just be blunt: The Sacrifice Game kicks ass. It’s a total blast.

Perhaps, in time, The Sacrifice Game will join the ranks of other anti-Christmas movies like Die Hard, Batman Returns, and Gremlins. Or, the one that started them all: Black Christmas. While I don’t think The Sacrifice Game is perfect (nor do I believe movies should strive for “perfection”), it is an ambitious picture that revels in the ever-increasing absurdity of its plot. It’s not a movie that shies away from the growing ludicrousness that unfolds—instead, it dives right into it.

As Samantha says, “Blackvale girls stick together,” and even that little line has a deeper meaning than we initially realize until the very end.

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-ray
Shudder and OCN Distribution don a Santa suit and deliver human sacrifice for Christmas this year, in a single-disc Blu-ray release housed in a standard case. Inside the case is a wide screenshot from the film, sprawling across both sides of the housing.

I have a lot of praise for the 1080p high-definition video presentation for The Sacrifice Game. The cinematography from Alexandre Bussière is exquisite. I feel like modern-day horror, in the era of HD videography, have forgotten (or lost) the fine art of lighting shadows. Too often, horror films these days are shot day-for-night and I understand the appeal and the ease of doing that. But let’s be real: It looks terrible. Bussière lights the corridors of Blackvale Academy in a way that harkens back to the masters. This feels like it’s calling out to the masterworks of someone like Dean Cundey. Technically, the disc, too, is free of any errors. I wasn’t able to see any of the usual culprits present—no color banding, no aliasing. Just a clean, sharp picture with an affection for shooting in the dark, and knowing how to light for it.

Call it chance, call it “that’s how the cookie crumbles sometimes” but for whatever reason the last however many movies I’ve been watching have either been mixed in mono, stereo or straight-up mistakenly labeled as surround and it winds up being… mono, or stereo. Or, if I do get a 5.1 mix, it’s not a particularly good one. The Sacrifice Game being encoded in DTS-HD MA 5.1, and being a damn good mix, was such a wonderful breath of fresh air for me. The filmmakers clearly had a blast in their sound design and were cognizant of which speakers should ping which effects. Characters talking off-screen would very specifically pitch through one of the rears, with an echo radiating toward the front of the soundstage. A memory of war produced an almost effervescent series of effects, the horror of combat floating dreamily like a half-forgotten memory, in between waking life and a nightmare.

The Sacrifice Game isn’t particularly rife with supplemental features, but it does have a pair of good ones: An audio commentary and a behind-the-scenes featurette with interviews with the cast and crew. Both features provide a lot of insight into the making of the feature with filmmaker insights fans will enjoy.

• Audio Commentary - Director/Co-Writer Jenn Wexler, Co-Writer Sean Redlitz, Producer Heather Buckley, Producer Albert Melamed, and Producer Philip Kalin
• Behind the Scenes Featurette (HD 22:03)
• Twilight of the Flesh (HD 2:36) - Music Video
• Behind the Scenes Still Gallery
• Trailer

The Sacrifice Game is a rare beast in that it’s openly reminiscent of other films and wears those influences on its sleeve but feels refreshing in its originality. It acknowledges other similar works without being beholden to them. The plot is unafraid to venture into brand new territory and carve its mark. It’s not always successful in what it sets out to do, but more often that not, it succeeds wildly in telling a wicked, sadistic little story. Shudder's release of The Sacrifice Game through OCN Distribution has excellent audio/video presentations and comes Highly Recommended.