The legendary Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky traveled to Sweden to complete “The Sacrifice,” which, unbeknownst to him, would be his final work. As with much of his career, the film examined death and faith in an apocalyptic scenario in an allegorical, dreamlike manner. This strange mystical film beautifully concludes the man’s singular oeuvre.
“The Sacrifice” begins with Alexander (Erland Josephson), a retired theater actor and academic, quietly enjoying a birthday with a few friends and family. A faithless man, he begins declaiming the spiritual emptiness and technological preoccupation of the modern world. He wishes all people, including himself, would cease their endless talk and he wonders what might change if someone finally committed to defiant, wordless action.
However, as the movie progresses, the group becomes confined to their home during the onset of a global nuclear war. Faced with impending death, Alexander at last prays to God, promising to give up his family, house and possessions if they are spared from the conflict. In a strange sequence, his friend tells him to become intimate with one of their housemaids, reportedly a witch. He does so and awakens the following day with the war mysteriously averted. In keeping with his promise, Alexander tricks his family into leaving their house before setting it ablaze and is finally dragged away in an ambulance.
“The Sacrifice,” described by Tarkovsky as a parable, combines Christian and Nietzschean themes in examining the response of a spiritually bereft man to the apocalypse. Alexander, having spent a lifetime endlessly pontificating through his writing, becomes disgusted with his and others’ inaction in addressing the prioritization of unnecessary technological progress aimed at either comfort or violent repression. He talks briefly about the deep fear of death, which, as Alexander says, often drives people to make poor decisions. Reflecting on these ideas, Alexander embodies the opening quote by avoiding commitment to any specific action or belief system. Instead, he focuses on continually questioning society’s blind confidence in technological progress.
The characters offer two responses to this wish to resolve doubt and to act conclusively. One of Alexander’s friends mentions Nietszche’s concept of the same eternally recurring life, and the protagonist scoffs at the man’s belief that humans can make their universal model into being. His friend responds, “If I truly believe, it will be so.” This course represents one’s acceptance of his life exactly as it is, despite its hopelessness, even if it repeats ad infinitum. Alexander takes a different path. Pushed by his apocalyptic circumstances into embracing faith as an answer to his fear and doubt, he makes a one-way promise to God to save his family and release him from the all-consuming fear of death in exchange for sacrificing his relationships and attachments.
Just as Alexander stated before, fear of death makes one do things he shouldn’t. Alexander’s flight to superstition (sleeping with a “witch”) and blind faith leads him to destroy his house and most likely wreck his most important relationships. Before he has a relationship with the woman, he tells a story about a past attempt to clean his mother’s garden, which resulted in its ugliness. Likewise, his attempt to clean up the chaos and ruin of his life resulted in more violence and pain as well as a less desirable situation.
While this film hardly seems to embrace a fully Nietzschean outlook, the words of the protagonist’s friend about surmounting the fear of death through a willing acceptance of life as it is offers a different approach to addressing one’s spiritual turmoil. Accomplished through ritual action and a changed outlook, the will to power over one’s life arises from embracing and acting to change it. In fleeing his spiritual confusion and degrading fear of death, Alexander brings greater suffering to his family. His desire to dispel his own doubt and finally accomplish something leads him to grasp at incomplete and false notions of faith as if it were a binding promise with the Almighty and then carry it through to its disastrous conclusion.