Sacrifice, The (4K UHD Review)
- Review Date: Jun 18, 2025
- Format: 4K Ultra HD
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Director
Andrei TarkovskyRelease Date(s)
1986 (February 4, 2025)Studio(s)
Sandrew Metronome (Kino Classics)- Film/Program Grade: A+
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: B+
- Extras Grade: A-
Review
Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky left us in late December of 1986 at the far too young age of 54, but not before gifting the world with one final masterpiece that was the perfect summation of everything that he had done up to that point: The Sacrifice (aka Offret). Tarkovsky was living in a self-imposed exile after having left his native Russia for good during the production of his previous film Nostalghia—which was a painful irony, considering that the primary subject matter of that film was the particularly intense nostalgia that Russians feel for their homeland. Yet there was a secondary subject in Nostalghia that would become his final obsession: the nature of self-sacrifice. In that film, the mad Dominico (Erland Josephson) decides to do something drastic in order to call attention to the way that modern life has alienated everyone from their surroundings, and even more importantly, alienated everyone from each other as well. Tarkovsky himself craved a new form of spirituality that would rescue mankind from what he called the “insanity of modern civilization,” and that spirituality must perforce involve sacrifice, as he explained in Sculpting in Time:
“I am interested above all in the character who is capable of sacrificing himself and his way of life—regardless of whether that sacrifice is made in the name of spiritual values, or for the sake of someone else, or of his own salvation, or of all these things together.”
Tarkovsky had conceived of the basic scenario for The Sacrifice prior to filming Nostalghia, albeit in a drastically different form. It involved a man named Alexander who was dying of cancer (the very disease that would claim Tarkovsky). A friend tells him that he must make his way to the home of a local witch and spend the night with her, and when he does so, he’s miraculously cured. Recognizing it as an act of God’s mercy, Alexander realizes that he must turn his back on all of his possessions and his previous lifestyle. While Tarkovsky retained the character of the witch, by the time that he had finalized the script for The Sacrifice, Alexander’s sickness was of a far more universal sort: naked terror in the face of impending nuclear annihilation. That made his ultimate sacrifice not in response to his own salvation, but rather for the sake of someone else—or rather, for everyone else.
The Sacrifice opens with Alexander (Josephson again) planting a Japanese tree by the side of the ocean, aided by his mute young son “Little Man” (Tommy Kjellqvist), who has just had an operation on his throat. Alexander feels compelled to fill any silence with words, so he relates the story of an orthodox monk who patiently scaled a mountain with a bucket of water, each and every day, in order to water a barren tree. Eventually, the tree returned to life. Alexander is fascinated by the concept of repetition, feeling that it may be the only way to create change:
“Say what you like—a method or system is paramount. You see, sometimes, I tell myself that if every single day, at exactly the same time, you did exactly the same thing, like a ritual: resolutely and methodically, at exactly the same time every day, then the world would change. Something in it would change, inevitably.”
The pair are joined by the local postman Otto (Allan Edwall), who is only too happy to debate metaphysics with Alexander. Alexander rejects Otto’s views on Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence, despite the fact that he’s just articulated his own microcosmic version of it. He tells Otto that his own relationship with God has become non-existent. Meanwhile, the sound of thunder can be heard in the distance, portending the far more ominous geopolitical storm that’s rolling inexorably toward them. (Or is it really thunder? As with most things Tarkovsky, there’s room for interpretation there.)
All of that unfolds in a single shot that lasts nine minutes and twenty-six seconds, the longest shot of Tarkovsky’s career. The landscape is barren aside from a few small trees and a single shack in the background, which puts the focus on Alexander, Little Man, and Otto, and yet the fact that they’re relatively small objects within the wide-open frame is hardly insignificant. Aside from some gentle lateral movements back and forth along a dolly track, there’s none of the elaborate camerawork that Martin Scorsese has put into his own legendary long takes, and yet this shot is no less impressive—and it’s far more impactful, too. It lays out the entire thesis for the film, which will be brought full circle near the conclusion by another lengthy single shot where Alexander restores his relationship with God by following his own mandate: “If only there was someone who’d stop talking and do something instead!”
Alexander is a retired actor living in a remote home by the sea, along with Little Man, his somewhat distant wife Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood), and his stepdaughter Marta (Filippa Franzén). They’re tended by Little Man’s doctor Victor (Sven Wollter), his nursemaid Julia (Valérie Mairesse), and the enigmatic housemaid Maria (Guðrún Gísladóttir). It’s Alexander’s birthday, and everyone has gathered in celebration when the remote sounds of thunder turn to a violent rumble as jets fly over the house. The world is now at war, which sends Adelaide into hysterics. Otto considers himself to be a student of paranormal phenomena, and while everyone else frets, Otto suggests to Alexander that Maria is a witch who holds the key to saving the world. Alexander does have a transcendent encounter with Maria, but it’s his own promise to God that really matters. Earlier, after bringing an elaborate gift for Alexander, Otto had explained that “Every gift involves a sacrifice. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be much of a gift.” Alexander takes those words to heart, and offers his own sacrifice if God will avert the crisis:
“I give you all that I have. I will desert my beloved family, destroy my home, give up the boy. I will turn dumb and will never speak to anyone again. I renounce everything that binds me to this life, if only you restore everything to how it was before this morning and yesterday, so that I can be spared this mortal, this sickening, brutal terror. Nay, everything! Lord, help me. I will do everything I have promised you.”
Alexander does indeed do everything that he promised, cutting himself off from friends, family, his possessions, and yes, even Little Man, all in atonement for Mankind’s sins. Yet like the mad Dominico in Nostalghia, there’s no guarantee that anyone else will ever understand his sacrifice. Tarkovsky openly acknowledged that The Sacrifice is a parable, but one without a straightforward explanation: “The metaphor of the film is consistent with the action and needs no elucidation. I knew that the film would be open to a number of interpretations, but I deliberately avoided pointing to specific conclusions because I considered that those were for the audience to reach independently.” All of which raises more questions than it answers. In the opening shot of The Sacrifice, Alexander tells Little Man that “’In the beginning was the Word,’ but you are mute, mute as a fish.” In the final shot, Little Man lays down by the tree that they planted earlier, and speaks his first (and only) words in the entire film:
“’In the beginning was the Word.’ Why is that, Daddy?”
Cinematographer Sven Nykvist shot The Sacrifice on 35mm film using Arriflex 35BL III cameras with spherical Cooke Varotal zoom lenses, framed at 1.66:1 for its theatrical release. This 4K Ultra HD release uses the 2023 digital restoration by the Swedish Film institute, which was based on 4K scans of the original camera negative and a 35mm dupe negative. The latter wasn’t used due to excessive damage to the camera negative, but rather because of the complex way that Nykvist achieved Tarkovsky’s intentions for the look of The Sacrifice. Much of the film is desaturated to varying degrees, an effect that was achieved photochemically, and the most accurate way to replicate it digitally was to utilize a later generation timed element instead of the camera negative. The downside to that is that the levels of detail, grain, and contrast can vary a bit throughout the film, but that’s how The Sacrifice has always looked.
Nykvist used Kodak 5294 stock, which depending on exposure was capable of being very finely grained. That’s certainly true of the opening shot of the film, where the 1:66:1 aspect ratio and plenty of headroom at the top and bottom of the frame almost makes it look like it was shot on large format IMAX film. The contrast, colors, detail, and grain are all nearly perfect, and it’s simply stunning. As the story progresses and Tarkovsky switches to various levels of desaturation and even full black-and-white, the grain gets coarser, the detail softens a bit, and the contrast range becomes more constrained. The interiors can look a bit flat, with Otto’s dark suit coat sometimes not resolving against the shadows, but that’s not so much black crush as it is the nature of the dupe elements and the process that was used to create them. There’s no HDR grade, but it does offer 10-bit color in SDR, and the extra color depth is obvious with the varying shades in the green and brown grasses on the plains. The greenish color cast from Kino’s 2018 Blu-ray is gone this time around, with everything looking much more natural. (The full black-and-white sequences now look like true black-and-white, not pale green.)
There’s little remaining damage aside from a few nearly invisible scratches and other blemishes, although there are some occasional hairs at the bottom edge of the frame. If there’s one criticism of this presentation, it’s that despite the encode running at a consistently high bitrate, it still struggles with the grain in a few places, like the bright sheets on the boy’s bed in the desaturated section at 50:11. The grain can become noisy and swarm a bit in places like that, but it’s a minor issue that probably won’t even be visible on all displays. In all other respects, this is a gorgeous 4K master, looking every bit like an ultra-high quality film print. I’ve seen The Sacrifice on 35mm, VHS, LaserDisc, DVD, Blu-ray, and now 4K, and while I wouldn’t presume to claim that my memories of each of them are perfect, this is undoubtedly the best that The Sacrifice has ever looked.
Audio is offered in Swedish 2.0 mono DTS-HD Master Audio, with removable English subtitles. While there’s a touch of excessive sibilance to some of the dialogue, it’s a surprisingly strong mono mix, with plenty of life to the various pieces of source music that Tarkovsky chose, and some actual depth to the low end when the jets fly over the house. While production sound was recorded on set, much of the dialogue ended up being re-recorded during post-production, so it doesn’t always integrate well into the soundstage, but it’s still perfectly clear and comprehensible.
The Kino Classics 4K Ultra HD release of The Sacrifice is a two-disc set that includes a Blu-ray with a 1080p copy of the film. While their 2018 Blu-ray release of the film had most of the extras on a separate DVD, in this case they’ve been added to the remastered Blu-ray (although Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky is still in SD). There’s also a slipcover that duplicates the re-release poster artwork on the insert. The following extras are included:
DISC ONE: UHD
- Audio Commentary by Layla Alexander-Garrett
DISC TWO: BD
- Audio Commentary by Layla Alexander-Garrett
- Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (SD – 101:35)
- Interview with Michal Leszczylowski (HD – 32:18)
- The Sacrifice Re-Release Trailer (HD – 1:53)
- Nostalghia Re-Release Trailer (HD – 1:32)
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky is a 1988 documentary by Michal Leszczylowski, co-editor of The Sacrifice. It blends behind-the-scenes footage that was shot on set by Arne Carlsson with a variety of different interviews, and it also includes excerpts from Tarkovsky’s writings read by Erland Josephson. It offers an invaluable portrait of the fluid way that Tarkovsky brought the visions in his head to concrete life: not exactly improvising as he went along, but still being responsive to the way that everything developed on set and adjusting his intentions based on what he saw. Yet he never compromised, just reacted. Carlsson captured the devastation that Tarkovsky and the rest of his crew felt when the camera failed during the first take of the climactic scene, as well as the miraculous second take after everything was rebuilt in a matter of days. To Tarkovsky, there was never any other choice. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky is presented here in SD at 1.33:1 in Russian, Swedish, Italian, and English 2.0 mono Dolby Digital audio, with removable English subtitles.
While Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky has made the rounds on a variety of different releases of The Sacrifice, Kino added a commentary track and an interview with Leszczylowski for their 2018 Blu-ray, both of which have been carried forward here. Leszczylowski recounts how he met Tarkovsky and the many challenges in the making of The Sacrifice, as well as his own work putting together Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. He also discusses his feelings about Tarkovsky’s death.
The commentary is by Layla Alexander-Garrett, who served as Tarkovsky’s translator on the set of The Sacrifice, with occasional contributions from an unidentified moderator. She provides basic details about her own background and how she ended up working on the film, but goes into much more detail providing a portrait of Andrei Tarkovsky. She says that he was a closed man and difficult to get close to, but he was honest and sincere in his art, tearing open his own skin and showing everything that he had. That’s as apt a description of what the director accomplished with not just The Sacrifice, but Nostalghia as well. She also breaks down the development of the script for The Sacrifice, analyzes its themes, and shares her experiences working on the set. Note that her commentary doesn’t start until more than halfway through the opening credits, and despite the prompting there are some other gaps as well, but it’s still worth being patient to hear all that she has to say.
Alexander-Garrett recorded a different commentary for the Region B Blu-ray from Curzon Film/Artificial Eye in the U.K., which obviously hasn’t been included here. Their release also offered two different featurettes, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Metaphysical Dream Zone Part 7: The Sacrifice – Disharmony and the Ideal and Andrei Tarkovsky: Poetic Harmony, plus an introduction for Metaphysical Dream Zone. Aside from some photo galleries that have appeared on a variety of different discs, the only other extras of note that are missing here is the Memories of Tarkovski featurette that appeared on the Region 2 DVD from Another World Entertainment in Scandinavia and on the Region 2 DVD from Cameo Media in Spain. The latter also included an interview with Erland Josephson and the documentaries Sätta Ljus and Bygga bilder. Neither of them appears to have been included on any HD releases of The Sacrifice, which is a real shame. Bygga bilder covers production designer Anna Asp’s work with Tarkovsky, while Sätta Ljus focuses on Sven Nykvist’s approach to lighting in The Sacrifice.
Yet there’s no denying that the Kino Classics 4K Ultra HD release of The Sacrifice is the ultimate edition of the film to date. It does include the most important extra of all, Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, and the picture quality puts all previous releases of The Sacrifice to shame—Kino’s included. It’s a massive visual upgrade. Tarkovsky gifted us with just seven feature films, and all of them belong in any real film lover’s library—and having them in the best possible quality certainly doesn’t hurt.
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).