At first, it seems that Sacrifice, from French director Romain Gavras, is trying to do its best Triangle of Sadness. Chris Evans, shaggy of hair and beard, plays a down-on-his-luck movie star, Mike Tyler, who is trying to rehab his image by attending a swanky environmental fundraiser on a remote Greek island. He’s surrounded by vain, rich swells — and he himself is one, too. Gavras, working from a script he co-wrote with Pulitzer-finalist playwright Will Arbery, seems to be poking fun at the vacuous postures of the oligarch class, just as Ruben Östlund and many other filmmakers have in recent years.

Before too long, though, Sacrifice ventures off into much stranger, more sincere territory, becoming a drama that mulls over surrendering to a higher power. When the party is invaded by a group of young terrorists led by Anya Taylor-Joy’s Joan (that name is no accident, I’m sure), Mike is swept up into a curious adventure of the soul, featuring a deranged scientist and a volcano-worshipping cult. The film is a mess, opaque in its argument and tiring in its effortful weirdness, and yet in its best moments has a hypnotic pull. 

Credit for that goes to Gavras’ past as a music video director — he has a keen, bold talent for marrying startling images with enveloping sound. Sacrifice, a Greek-French-American coproduction, often looks like a zillion bucks. It’s an outré movie that nonetheless operates on spectacle scale, with its helicopters, lavish sets and bold-name actors. (Joining Evans and Taylor-Joy are Salma Hayek Pinault, Vincent Cassel, Sam Richardson, and very briefly Charlie xcx.) Gavras’ maximalism is welcome; we need more filmmakers who are willing to go grandiose, accusations of pretension be damned. 

He’s less adept as a storyteller. For all of its oddball elements, Sacrifice traffics in plenty of clichés, from a “trippy, maaaan” drug haze hallucination sequence to its standard-issue antihero redemption arc. The film also bears too close a resemblance to Östlund’s work, to The Menu, to the recent dud Opus. Sacrifice may go to wilder places than those other projects, but it’s yet another of the numerous eat-the-rich allegories that have been churned out in response to Trumpism, techno-fascism, the pandemic and widening economic gaps. 

Though it is possible that all those trappings are there just to sell the film. Gavras and Arbery may have other, more singular aims in mind, hidden beneath all the obvious skewering of witless wealth. Those who’ve seen Arbery’s theater work, particularly his dense religious treatise Heroes of the Fourth Turning, will know that he is a big-ideas guy, an existentialist who wants to tangle with heavy matters of humanity and the divine. In some ways, Sacrifice is an entreaty for a return to pure, even blind faith, albeit not of the Christian variety. Mike’s journey in the film is one of abnegation and humility, which Arbery (and, presumably, Gavras) might suggest is one way to deal with the ever-mounting apocalyptic unease that has gripped much of the world of late. 

Of course, every human era is obsessed with its end, a fact that connects Sacrifice to something more primal than mere 21st-century anxiety. That’s an admirably ambitious swing to take, but Gavras and Arbery spend a little too much time being silly to truly sell us on the headier stuff. It’s tough to turn so quickly from arch to imploring: Sacrifice causes a bit of whiplash, failing to deliver either the mean and caustic comedy an audience might expect or the profound treatise on the nature of belief that the film eventually attempts to become.

Evans, trying his noble best to keep his bearings, struggles to figure out the right tone of any given scene. Taylor-Joy is, as ever, effectively otherworldly, but we’ve seen her do this routine before, offsetting her ethereal bearing with a determined hardness. Gavras doesn’t give her many new levels to play beyond a few scenes of mild flirtation; the character grows dull in all her unwavering conviction. 

Dullness is a general problem in Sacrifice, which spins its wheels in its middle stretch, killing time before its fiery finale. The jokes get more leaden until they disappear entirely, and all that’s left is the fulfillment of a prophecy that is somehow only further muddled the more it is explained. John Malkovich shows up for a tangent that is meant to be expositional, but really only needlessly delays what’s coming. Joan is unwavering in her mission, and nothing that Mike or anyone else tries can stop her.

Rather than conjuring a mood of bracing inexorability, this linear focus only suffocates what might be an interesting debate, as a man of the modern world weighs his values against those of a woman raised in atavistic isolation. Sacrifice urges its audience to really consider the weight of its title, to ponder what we might cede to the universe so that our planet and our people continue on as they have for hundreds of thousands of years. It doesn’t persuasively make a case, though. Instead, it is another supposedly radical act that woefully fails to inspire action.