Sacrifice is the story of an American doctor who moves to Wales with her husband. Unable to have children, the couple move back to the husband's homeland, the Shetland Islands, to adopt a child. When attempting to bury a dead horse, our hero discovers a dead body on her property, leading her onto a conspiracy of sacrificial practices dating back centuries. Is this all fairy-tale stuff or can she prove the men on this island continue the tradition to this day?As my title notes, this plot closely resembles the plot of "The Wicker Man": an outsider arrives on an island, begins to investigate mysterious happenings, and gets in trouble for their efforts. But unlike "The Wicker Man", this movie is far less enjoyable.I guess I'll start off with the positives. The setting is beautiful. I can watch those Welsh hills forever and the cliffside footage is stunning to look at. I also enjoyed seeing Rupert Graves in something. I stopped watching "Sherlock" a while back so it was nice to see him pop up. He's... okay in his role. I did enjoy the scene where he bashes that guy's head in with a rock, absolutely brutal!The rest of this though isn't great. The dialogue is extremely clunky; the screenwriters had no idea how to write good exposition. It all feels very forced and rushed. The average movie-goer can see this plot twist coming from a mile away. Within 20 minutes I knew what the remainder of the movie was going to be. The lighting, especially during the climax was horrendous. I couldn't even tell what was going on.And then just a lot of this plot didn't make sense to me. Why move your wife back to Scotland if you know she's in danger of being murdered by your father and his weird cult? Why would that lawyer use his real name when dealing with that family to take their sister and have her pretend to be his wife? Why did that fake computer tell the doctor in the beginning that the baby was positive for cocaine? We never even acknowledge this. There's a lot more that I have problems with but I've wasted enough time on this.I wouldn't recommend this movie. It's not good but it's not bad enough to be enjoyable to watch either. The pacing is slow and there's really nothing noteworthy to see here.

How did this movie get made? The shots are all set up really nice - but the plot is so boring. Honestly - nothing happens in the entire film. The dialogue is bad. Now - it starts off pretty good - but then it just filters into pure rubbish. This woman cannot have children - so she sort of faces her loss by solving this mystery about some pagan Scottish folk who kill pregnant woman - or something - but the movie is so slow and so boring - it's just not good at all. It's hard to care - when the plot is so boring. The film kind of tries hard to be 'method' - so people are people - and there isn't really good v evil - more than there is levels of corruption - and the film tries to give some characters a moral compass for dramatic purposes - but for whatever reason the character's moral compass just falls flat. It's not unbelievable - it's just hard to care about any of these people. it could be that the plot is so predictable - and there are basically no good reversals that make it worth watching. What happens can be seen a mile away - then it happens - and its boring.

SACRIFICE is a horror film that doesn't want to be a horror film. Instead it would rather be a mature police procedural thriller, with lots of mystery aspects, but there's no getting away from the fact that the narrative is rooted in folk horror no matter how much the writer and director try to distance themselves from the genre.The storyline is about an American doctor who goes to live on the Shetland islands with her husband and soon discovers a body missing a heart. It all points to sinister conspiracies and sacrifice, and she's soon up to her neck in danger. The film is beautifully shot - in Ireland for the most part - with lots of welcome outdoor location photography, and the plot feels like an episode of SILENT WITNESS with hints of THE WICKER MAN.A shame, then, that the central detective story is so restrained and predictable. Radha Mitchell is a good actress, and she has a bit of charm here, but otherwise the it all feels very routine and difficult to get excited about. I liked seeing Ian McElhinney (GAME OF THRONES) in support but the rest of the cast are pretty boring, and things resolutely play out in the most predictable way imaginable.

I reside on the Shetland Islands, and I found it almost laughable that the director or producer decided to put the name of islands in a hat and pick out Unst on the Shetland Islands. I also used to live in Unst before moving to the main town in Shetland, Lerwick (Leirvik, its Scandinavian title) and if only Unst had such high tech amenities and infrastructures, because it does not. lol The film is poorly done with obvious editing errors in it. I also noticed the very strong Scottish accents, which bares no resemblance to the Unst dialect or even this of Shetland. It reminds me of the islands of Orkney, where children were taken from their parents because one child said the parents were involved in devil worshipping and alike. However, thankfully the children were returned to the parents after it was discovered the child made the story up. I suspect this is where the Director/Producer got his story line from???