Is Sacrifice (2026) Woke?

Romain Gavras arrives with a film about people who care very publicly about the planet, which is itself distributed by a streaming platform that cares very publicly about content. The symmetry is, one supposes, the point. Set at a Greek charity gala where tech billionaire Ben Bracken celebrates a deep-sea mining venture beneath neon signs reading "Make Earth Cool Again," Sacrifice deploys its satirical premise with the confidence of a filmmaker who has correctly identified a target and then elected to shoot in every direction at once. Chris Evans plays a disgraced action star attempting to rehabilitate his image through performed outrage, a casting choice so on-the-nose it circles back around to being interesting. Anya Taylor-Joy, styled with the blunt bangs of a certain Swedish climate activist, plays Joan, an eco-militant who has concluded that the most logical response to the climate crisis is to throw three billionaires into a volcano. Her logic is presented as deranged. It is also, the film quietly acknowledges, not entirely without a certain internal consistency.

The film positions itself as equal-opportunity cynicism, skewering both the ultra-wealthy and the radical zealots who wish to immolate them, which is a safe place to stand when you are a film about skewering people. Critics at the A.V. Club and Roger Ebert's site observed that this balanced contempt produces something insipid: a film that declines to commit to any position long enough to say anything. The anti-capitalist framing is vivid and the "eat the rich" genre furniture is well-arranged, but the film ultimately uses radicalism as spectacle, absorbing eco-terrorism into a digestible thriller the same way the billionaires in the film absorb climate guilt into branded philanthropy. Whether this is a sophisticated meta-commentary or simply the same recuperative mechanism it depicts is a question the film appears unbothered by.

Co-written by Will Arbery, who previously wrote about young conservative Catholics with genuine curiosity in Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Sacrifice has the fingerprints of someone who finds true believers of all kinds genuinely interesting. That instinct is present but outnumbered. The film is at its most alive when it treats Joan's fanaticism as a real spiritual phenomenon rather than a punchline, and at its most inert when it retreats into the safer comedy of rich people being oblivious. Gavras, son of Costa-Gavras, clearly has the political cinema inheritance in his blood. Whether he has chosen to spend it wisely here is, like most charitable donations, a matter of some debate.