Sacrifice (2016)

Elevator Pitch: A married couple, one a doctor,the other an architect, move from New York to the husband’s place of birth, Unst, the most northerly of the Shetland Islands. They find work, the wife in the local hospital, and they prepare to go though the process of adopting a baby. When the eviscerated body of a young woman is found, and the wife finds traces of a secret society on the island, she feels compelled to investigate a history of missing young women, and the evidence of numbers of men with sons but no wives.

Content: Most of the film seems to consist of the wife creeping about in the cellars, mortuary and pathology lab of the hospital, in the dark. She and her husband also attend slightly sinister parties and the wife forms a friendship with a female police sargeant who is pregnant, that is until she disappears. There are establishing shots of bits of Shetland uplands, the island on which the hospital is set and, disconcertingly, a harbour in Ireland. (We can see that registry of a fishing boat.) Was this a mistake or a plot line that had been removed, or did I miss something?

A View: I was not going to bother to review this movie but realised that I would be doing my few followers a disservice if I did not. And really as an aside, I have been to Unst and years ago it was dominated by the vast golf ball which concealed a missile early warning system. I did not see any sign of it on the screen. This movie combined a series of unlikely or impossible events in an attempt to do a sort of Wicker Man presentation. The Roger Ebert critique, which usually tries to see something good in any film, gave it one star, which is one more than I would give it. So it is a DON’T SEE for me.