[3] The Sacrifice was Tarkovsky's third film as a Soviet expatriate, after Nostalghia and the documentary Voyage in Time, and he died shortly after its completion.

He lives in a beautiful house with his actress wife Adelaide, stepdaughter Marta, and young son, "Little Man", who is temporarily mute due to a throat operation.

In his monologue, he first recounts how he and Adelaide found their house near the sea by accident, and how they fell in love with it and its surroundings, but then enters a bitter tirade against the state of modern man.

As Tarkovsky wrote, Alexander is weary of "the pressures of change, the discord in his family, and his instinctive sense of the threat posed by the relentless march of technology"; in fact, he has "grown to hate the emptiness of human speech".

The guests chat inside the house, where Otto reveals that he is a student of paranormal phenomena, a collector of "inexplicable but true incidents."

Just when dinner is almost ready, the rumbling noise of low-flying jet fighters interrupts them, and soon after, as Alexander enters, a news program announces the beginning of what appears to be World War III, and possibly nuclear holocaust.

[n 1] As Maria leaves, the "mute" Little Man, lying at the foot of the tree, speaks his only line, which quotes the opening of the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word.

[9] Tarkovsky considered The Sacrifice different from his earlier films because, while his recent films had been "impressionistic in structure", in this case he not only "aimed...to develop [its] episodes in the light of my own experience and of the rules of dramatic structure", but also to "[build] the picture into a poetic whole in which all the episodes were harmoniously linked", and because of this, it "took on the form of a poetic parable".

Despite a contemporaneous offer to shoot Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa, Nykvist later said it was "not a difficult choice", and like Josephson, he became a co-producer when he invested his fees back into the film.

The footage in the final version of the film is the second take, which lasts six minutes (and ends abruptly because the camera had run through an entire reel).

[4][21] The film opens and closes with the aria "Erbarme dich, mein Gott" ("Have mercy, my God") from Johann Sebastian Bach's St Matthew Passion.

The website's critical consensus states, "Formally impressive, visually accomplished, and narratively rewarding, The Sacrifice places a fittingly solid capstone on a brilliant filmmaking career".

[25] In 1995, the Vatican compiled a list of 45 "great films", separated into the categories of Religion, Values, and Art, to recognize the centennial of cinema.

[27] Catholic film critic Steven Greydanus contrasts the film's "dialectic of Christian and pagan ideas" with Andrei Rublev, writing that, while Rublev "[rejects] the advances of an alluring pagan witch as incompatible with Christian love", The Sacrifice "juxtaposes" both sensibilities.