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Author: from Honolulu, Hawaii
This is the best movie I have seen so far. I watch it again about once or twice a year, like a ritual or an annual holiday I would be taking into levels of consciousness where the mind is not really required. I do not understand, and I do not feel like I have to, it is secondary. I feel touched like only pure and silent beauty can touch me, or bliss. It is obviously created around an idea of sacrifice, being both a gift to others but also to ourselves. By offering his life in order to save his family, his grandson and the world, the main character is also giving a true meaning to his own life that had mostly been of artificiality, questionings and shallowness. Every person who enters the house, he starts seeing under a deeper if not more expressionistic light… And when he meets with magic (while making love with the witch) he creates the bridge that will take him from reality into mystery. The whole film is as breathtaking and self-sufficient as a painting, or even more so, a Russian icon. It is ageless. I suppose it will remain with me for my entire life. I consider it Tarkovsky's last will, but even more so a piece of the Human Heritage that should be protected and kept accessible for future generation.
| By | (Palm Springs area, CA United States) - |
THE SACRIFICE is a great film. It touches on the most fundamental questions of being a human in our post-modern world. And it does it with extraordinary grace and a sublime, haunting, beauty.
To miss the point of this film, as some reviewers have, or to call it sophomoric, as others do, is to admit one's own inability to consider that life itself may hold a greater, dare I say, spiritual, meaning and that we are more than an accidental fluke in a cold, uncaring universe.
This film dares to use its considerable art to challenge us like a zen koan and a prayer. It is a meditation on what it means to be fully human and mortal and moral. It asks us to wonder at the unknown and it weeps that we are prisoners of our humanity — and that we hold the fate of our planet in our hands.
All this sounds kind of pretentious, I know, but this magnificent yet simple film works on a higher level than most movies. It's not easily categorized. But on a big screen, I was hypnotized by the extraordinary cinematography and equally transported by the subtle ideas. It was a transcendent movie going experience that I didn't expect and one that has remained vivid as the years pass.
