"The Sacrifice Game" slashes expectations as a culty, Christmassy boarding-school-invasioner

The Sacrifice Game (2023)

A cult killing around Christmastime and invading a girls’ boarding school is the simple premise behind “The Sacrifice Game.” Writer-director Jenn Wexler and co-writer Sean Redlitz, however, slaughter expectations as their film moves along. Wexler’s 2018 feature debut “The Ranger” was a decently nasty slasher between obnoxious punk rockers and a crazed park ranger, but her follow-up film takes everything up a notch, aesthetically and narratively.

Over Christmas break in 1971 at the Blackvale School for Girls, not every student is getting picked up. (This is very much a different film about holdovers than the one with Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph.) Teacher Rose (Chloë Levine) and her boyfriend Jimmy (Gus Kenworthy), the school’s chef, are all set to look after Samantha (Madison Baines) and outcast Clara (Georgia Acken). Meanwhile, a cult is on the move, venturing out for blood to complete a ritual and summon a demon. As the school’s mantra goes, Blackvale girls have to stick together if they don’t become sacrifices.

“The Sacrifice Game” sheds blood in its vicious opening moments with a home invasion and double homicide happening right in front of the house windows. The one-take sequence has echoes of the Manson Family and lets us know that, even with the Christmas setting, this film isn’t going soft on anyone. Even from there, writer-director Wexler and co-writer Redlitz refuse to play it safe, efficiently developing characters we can root for and then doing anything they want with them. Read the full review at GuyAtTheMovies.com

Grade: B

Shudder released "The Sacrifice Game" (90 min.) to stream on December 8, 2023.