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An Analysis on the movie “The Sacri�ce” (1986): Themes on

Spirituality, Modernity, War, Meaning and Sacri�ce that are still
relevant today

6-7 minutes

The movie The Sacri�ce (O�ret in its original title in Swedish) has become somewhat of a cult
�lm. Created by director Andrei Tarkovsky while he was dying from a brain tumor, and
almost at the end of the Cold War, had a unique plot and themes. It was about a lecturer and
former actor (Alexander) that lived in an island with his family and had a “nonexistent”
relationship with God. He had a beautiful house, a wife (Adelaide) and a son (Little Man),
who was temporarily mute due to an operation in his throat. The postman (Otto) had mystic
leanings and his friend (Victor, who is also the doctor that operated Little Man) visited him on
his birthday. In the house Maria, one of the maids, left, while Julia, another maid, stayed with
the others for dinner. During this wholesome day, World War III erupted. Every character had
a di�erent reaction to the controversy. The protagonist, Alexander, had the most profound
reaction, making a prayer to God and o�ering everything he holds dear in exchange of a
reversal of that catastrophic a�air (in other words, a Faustian bargain). The postman, who
had mystic beliefs, told Alexander that one of his maids, Maria, was a witch, and had the
power to ful�ll the wish of anyone if the person wished it while they had sex with her.
Alexander went to her house and laid with her, and the next day passed as if it was a normal
day. Seeing that the World War scenario was reverted, Alexander burned his house, for it was
part of the Faustian bargain that he did with God: to sacri�ce everything he holds dear, even
his family and his house, even renouncing life.

The movie, as most people has correctly put out, was very poetic in its display, for the
director had a peculiar way of doing long shots (he believed that cinema was a way of
displaying art in time) to capture the essence of a theme that he wanted to display. Modernity
was a constant theme because for the protagonist modernity had overshadowed spirituality:
while society was on a march to rapid development of technology and possible annihilation,
the spiritual aspects of man were not developed. It pondered on the meaning of an ultimate
sacri�ce, themes that run in Christianity as a whole (it had the sacri�ce of Christ) but also had
some remembrance of themes found in the book of Job, the man that lost everything but still
served God. Sacri�ce is seen as something tragic (not comedic), even when the outcome is a
greater good: it is the exchange of something that is very dear to so that another outcome of
equal importance could happen. Maybe the idea of the sacri�ce is so important here because
the director was dying of a brain tumor while �lming. It reminds me of other �lms that
ponder on the idea of sacri�ce as a phenomenon for art creation, like Christopher Nolan’s The
Prestige or Inception: that to create a work of art we have to sacri�ce a part of ourselves and
sometimes such a sacri�ce may go unnoticed (for example, Alexander’s sacri�ce could go
unnoticed by his family and friends and only he knows the alternate outcome if the sacri�ce
was not made).

There is also a reversion of a theme found in Candide, were at the end there is an analogy
between keeping the garden and Eden. Here, keeping or tending the garden maybe has some
modernist leaning, because Alexander, in a scene, told Maria about one time when he tried to
tend to his mother’s garden, for she was old and sick, and he worked on it for two weeks. But
then, when he went to the window where her mother usually sat to watch the garden, he saw
that it was butchered because of all the tending he did, instead of leaving it naturally as it
was. Here is an echo of the idea that modernity has superseded spirituality, on how the
unattended garden was more beautiful and aesthetic than the tended counterpart.
Also, the spiritual coordinates for a meaningful life are not explicit. It has an orientation to
Christianity (especially Orthodox Christianity because there is a scene that Alexander is
absorbed and in awe of Christian icons in a book about Orthodox Christianity), but there are
some pagan or mystic undertones in the movie. On the one hand is the postman, who has a
collection of items that have some inexplicable and mysterious meaning that are reminiscent
of paranormal phenomena (one is a photograph of a mother and his son before he goes to
war, his birth certi�cate and another photograph of the mother, twenty years or so later, and
his son at her side, still as young as eighteen). These inclinations on mysticism or paranormal
phenomena are not reminiscent of Christianity, but are still a glimpse to the supernatural. On
the other hand is Maria, the witch, who by some pagan magic ful�lls Alexander’s wishes. This
part of the �lm has aspects that are not Christian, like Alexander and Maria �oating while
having sex.

This �lm is an echo from another time when preoccupations on the possibility of a full-blown
war was imminent. At the time of �lming, the world was still in a Cold War, although few
could foresee that it was coming soon to a peaceful end and transition to a new century with
new political debates, but in the context of an end of history: the end of an almost century-
long and anxious Cold War. Yet the existential themes are still as important today as it were
all those years ago. Modernity, with all the adamant advances it could o�er us, it receded
spirituality, and we now are at a crossroads between people who live an inauthentic life (or in
Nietzsche’s terms, the last man) and the people who, after all the boons and riches that we
earned from the last century, are still searching for a life full of meaning.