After finishing The Sacrifice Game—released for Shudder and co-written by former Shudder staffer Sean Redlitz—I did think it was funny that there are two films out at the same time, set in the same time period, about students getting stuck at school over the holidays and forced to bond with an instructor. The only difference is, one involves cult murder and summoning a demon (No—NOT Paul Giamatti!!!). Slightly different from the plot of Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, The Sacrifice Game imagines two teens abandoned at an all-girls boarding school during Christmas, while a serial-killing band of miscreants sets out to perform a ritual leading to that very academic institution. Entertaining and surprisingly gory, though not particularly ingenious, The Sacrifice Game is a fairly enjoyable and under 100-minute caper about incompetent demon-worshippers led by Disney’s own Prince Aladdin, Mena Massoud, and the power of friendship between women.
Samantha (Madison Baines) has been forced to stay at the Blackvale School over the winter holiday, her first Christmas since her mother was killed in a car accident, which left Samantha under the sole care of a stepdad who never wanted her. Already struggling to make friends, Samantha’s only comrades for her miserable sojourn are Rose (Chloë Levine), a teacher who looks like she could be a student; Clara (Georgia Acken), a dark-haired emo with a curious self-harm fixation; and Jimmy (Gus Kenworthy), Rose’s affable love interest and another school employee.
At the same time, Jude (Massoud), Maisie (Olivia Scott Welch), Doug (Laurent Pitre) and Grant (Derek Johns), are off gallivanting in nearby homes, stabbing innocent people and slicing strange birth marks off their bodies. The most recent of these outings happened a mere 30 miles from Blackvale, yet no one cares to raise any flags for the innocent children left to stay there. After a deadly encounter with a stray deer and an armed police officer, the ill-meaning quartet arrives at the school’s doorstep under the obviously suspicious pretense of tending to Doug’s bullet wound.
Maisie reveals that she had gone to the Blackvale School in her youth, during which time she pored over books on blood magic tucked away in the basement, as there usually tends to be in the basement of a boarding school. This got her expelled—God forbid a woman have hobbies—but not before Maisie yanked a page on summoning a demon for safe-keeping. She held onto that page all these years later, along with the persistent desire to complete the ritual—in just one of a few instances of motivational reaching.
Led by Jude, Maisie’s charismatic and empty-headed lover, the group captures Samantha, Clara, Rose and Jimmy with the goal of sacrificing the “innocent schoolteacher” (but not the more innocent children??), spilling her blood and rolling out the welcome wagon for a demon who will grant all their wishes and make all their dreams come true. Wait, is that how this works? Spoiler alert: Rose is ultimately sacrificed, but the ritual doesn’t seem to take. Did the cultists fail? Did they do something wrong? Did they simply not have the dawg in them??
As Samantha and Clara try to break free from their captors, the gang tries frantically to understand where they went wrong. In the meantime, the demon, who has not only very much arrived but lain dormant in the school for many years, makes its plans for ultimate escape. Its freedom lies in a mistake Maisie made when she tore out that page all those years ago: The demon never needed to be summoned, it only needed to be set free.
Directed and co-written by The Ranger’s Jenn Wexler, The Sacrifice Game works as well as it does because of the fairly restrained ambitions of its plot, and how cleanly it executes them. The film is nastier than I ever would have anticipated: Flesh tears, blood gushes and pools, fingers depart ways with their hands. It’s not particularly gratuitous, just more visceral than I would have expected from a film that otherwise has the visual sheen of a higher-budget series, and a score which often sounds like it’s doing an overpowering, Hans Zimmer x Christopher Nolan thing. Aside from Levine, who admittedly gives off Disney Channel vibes, the performances range from fine enough to actually kind of great. Particularly, newcomer Acken is a disarmingly confident and threatening presence. In an unsettling scene, Clara strips to her underclothes and reveals a series of horrific torso scars to Grant, which she then forces Grant to touch. Intentionally disquieting, Acken captures the truth of her character with the ease of a seasoned performer.
Massoud and Pitre, too, are not only charismatic and charming but even funny at times; I both intimately understood why Walt Disney’s ghost himself chose Massoud to play Aladdin opposite a blue, CGI Will Smith genie and, despite never seeing the film, I’m confident Massoud’s skills are far better used in The Sacrifice Game. Still, some of the character motivations feel contrived: None of the gang members’ hearts really seem in their brutal task, aside from Jude’s theatrical fanaticism and something about a religious upbringing, sacrifices working better than prayers and “having the vision.” It’s all a little wishy-washy, a little vague, but the other three are far less believable. It makes literally no sense at all why Maisie would have been so fixated on this spell for all these years—don’t all children just grow out of their fascination with the occult and conjuring spirits? Doug’s only motivation is that he loves Maisie, and Grant’s is that…he’s a Vietnam vet, so what else is he going to do but follow orders?
Shaky character motivations a creaky narrative makes, yet The Sacrifice Game is still a relatively sturdy little slice of holiday horror; that is to say, I did not have a bad time. Not particularly scary, more just good old-fashioned fun, and the narrative moves along at a brisk clip where other horrors might linger a little too long with weak relationships, mundane conversations and, even worse, “feelings.” Though Samantha is very much the emotional core, The Sacrifice Game is light and relatively self-aware (it has to be, with the absurdity of its macabre conclusion), but not in an irony-poisoned way. The Sacrifice Game is silly, but it’s focused on the meat and potatoes of a solid story instead of getting lost in the sauce of heady themes or ambitious set pieces. It’s just eccentric enough to lift it from being another two-star horror film that is neither bad nor good but a worse third thing: Just OK. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, The Sacrifice Game would’ve been better, as most things usually are, if Paul Giamatti were in it.
Director: Jenn Wexler
Writer: Jenn Wexler, Sean Redlitz
Starring: Mena Massoud, Olivia Scott Welch, Gus Kenworthy, Madison Baines, Derek Johns, Laurent Pitre, Chloë Levine, Georgia Acken
Release Date: December 8, 2023 (Shudder)
Brianna Zigler is an entertainment writer based in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. Her work has appeared at Little White Lies, Film School Rejects, Thrillist, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more, and she writes a bi-monthly newsletter called That’s Weird. You can follow her on Twitter, where she likes to engage in stimulating discussions on films like Movie 43, Clifford, and Watchmen.