Chris Evans has spent enough time saving the world on screen for his casting in Sacrifice to carry its own joke. In the new trailer for Romain Gavras’s dark comedy, he plays Mike Tyler, an actor whose career needs resuscitating. His next opportunity to serve humanity involves becoming a human sacrifice. For an audience accustomed to watching him wield Captain America’s shield, the indignity is part of the attraction.
Mike’s attempted comeback takes him to an environmental charity gala, where Anya Taylor-Joy’s Joan and her followers interrupt proceedings with a demand for three hostages. They believe a volcanic sacrifice will avert catastrophe. Co-written by Gavras and Succession writer Will Arbery, the setup subjects a room accustomed to making symbolic gestures to people demanding something considerably more permanent.
“We need only three of you,” Joan announces in the trailer, making an appalling proposition sound like a reasonable concession. The premise gives Evans’s character a particularly Hollywood humiliation: somebody else has assigned him a role, and his objections carry little weight. It also suggests a nastier comic tension than the straightforward punishment of wealthy hypocrites. Joan’s conviction makes her dangerous; the guests’ concern for the planet gives her a set of professed values to hold them to.
Gavras has spent much of his career making collective aggression difficult to look away from. His music videos include M.I.A.’s “Born Free,” Justice’s “Stress” and Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild,” a body of work in which the beauty of an image can become uncomfortably entangled with the violence it depicts. That history makes Sacrifice an intriguing proposition: a filmmaker fluent in the seductions of spectacle directing a story about celebrities losing control of their own images.
The musicians in the cast extend that connection. Yung Lean plays Arthur, while Charli xcx appears as Mother Nature in what Gavras describes as a small cameo. He told Netflix that Lean was the first person cast, approached while the script was still being written. Vincent Cassel and Salma Hayek Pinault play the gala’s billionaire hosts, with Ambika Mod, Sam Richardson and John Malkovich also appearing. Gavras’s stated references stretch from Greek mythology and Joan of Arc to The Lord of the Rings, suggesting a fantasy adventure beneath the contemporary social targets.
Following its Toronto International Film Festival premiere in 2025, Sacrifice arrives on Netflix in the United States and France on October 16, 2026.
