Sacrifice is the title of the Italian extreme horror film directed by a woman, Poison Rouge, an Italian actress (House of Flesh Mannequins, Hyde's Secret Nightmare, The Hanged Man), model, athlete and performer who makes her directorial debut by distinguishing herself with a deviant and sad film.
Sacrifice, the first chapter of the "Death Trilogy" (of which it is a part. Torment), features Daniel (Roberto Scorza), a self-destructive drug addict who sinks into the abyss of pain and death, lost among unhealthy thoughts and memories that oppress him and have brought him to the brink of the precipice.
Poison Rouge's extreme horror is wrapped in elegant cinematography (by Domiziano Cristopharo), a feature that distinguishes it from classic extreme films that exude that typical sense of squalor and filth. It thus comes across as a refined extreme film, starring a protagonist who is apparently well-groomed but only externally because he is a victim of his own personal hell. Sacrifice cruelly paints his last hours of life (flashbacks help piece together the character's psychology), whose broken and wounded soul is locked in a cage of flesh to be torn apart.
The closed lustres prevent the rays of the sun, of life, from entering that bath that will turn into a kind of slaughterhouse. The character thus prepares, by candlelight, to martyr his body as in a ritual, beginning with simple cuts and going, slowly, further and further. In the grip of his agonizing delusions, Daniel savors a slow death in small touches, enjoying the self-inflicted pain and thus feeding his self-injuring side, driven by his now unstable mind.
It is his madness that arouses in the viewer a sense of sorrow and pity while, at the same time, the self-inflicted wounds manage to annoy (particularly the toenail wound and the one relating to his private parts) and to shock the audience's sensibilities (in this regard, the good special effects by Athanasius Pernath are noteworthy). All this is also thanks to Roberto Scorza, who copes with a difficult ordeal with skill.
Also welcome are the twists and turns related to the female figure embodying the goddess Ishtar, here well portrayed by Flora Giannattasio (pictured above left).
In Sacrifice also leverages the soundtrack, by Alexander Cimini, which well enhances the moments of unease. The film, however, suffers from some empty moments where the presence of distorted sounds or music would surely have given more emphasis to the power of the more extreme images.
Sacrifice offers a sad and dazzling spectacle about deviation and death, the latter savored with masochism, second by second. The final image, so painterly and macabre, is disarmingly beautiful.