Sacrifice Game and The Holdovers are 2023’s best Christmas pairing

When the movie world will get one in all its surprising cross-studio theme pairings — the best way summer season 1998 supplied two “impending planetary apocalypse” motion pictures in Armageddon and Deep Impact, or 2022 gave us two main Pinocchio motion pictures — it’s hardly ever clear on the floor whether or not the initiatives stem from company copycatting, divergent evolution, or sheer coincidence. Ultimately, it’s hardly ever value debating: What issues is whether or not the movies are pleasant and well-made, and whether or not they display higher collectively.

2023’s best unusual pairing in that vein is an surprising one: Alexander Payne’s touching found-family film The Holdovers and Jenn Wexler’s creepy horror film The Sacrifice Game, now on Shudder, develop into a surprisingly apt double characteristic — even when they’re utilizing comparable plotlines to very totally different ends.

Both motion pictures are set at Christmas inside a 12 months of one another: The Holdovers in 1970, The Sacrifice Game in 1971. Both revolve round distant, single-gender boarding colleges, the place one unfortunate instructor and just a few disconsolate college students are left behind to make no matter they’ll out of Christmas break after everybody else heads out for the vacations. Both are constructed round a sequence of unusual reveals, as some broad archetypal characters reveal hidden layers and hidden intentions. And each characteristic these academics and college students making stunning emotional connections with one another.

Only one in all them brings in a bunch of serial killers attempting to summon a demon with a purpose to declare its uncooked, unbridled energy, although. Watching the trailers for each motion pictures, it’s simple to guess which one.

What’s notably pleasant about watching these two motion pictures back-to-back is that they’re each such warmly well-intentioned motion pictures in regards to the melancholy feeling of being left behind at Christmas, and about discovering the spirit of the vacation outdoors of organic household. In The Holdovers, teenage troublemaker Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa, in a star-making efficiency) finds out simply hours earlier than his deliberate departure for a household Christmas journey that his mom and her new husband wish to spend Christmas alone to construct their relationship, and have determined to park him at his elite boarding college for the break. In The Sacrifice Game, Samantha (Madison Baines) has virtually the very same expertise: In her case, her mom died in a automobile accident earlier within the 12 months, and her stepfather is progressively disassociating himself from her, together with unexpectedly disinviting her from his vacation plans.

Neither of those younger folks was anticipating to be abruptly discarded by folks they thought-about household, and they every spend their respective motion pictures struggling to throttle down their lively disappointment for the sake of primary politeness. Angus is older, angrier, and bolder than Samantha, and he channels his upset over the information way more aggressively than she does. There are different minor variations as nicely, ones that learn as particularly gendered: In The Holdovers, because the instructor answerable for overseeing a small group of jilted college students for the vacations, huffy boarding-school prof Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) tries to implement a rigorous routine of character-building bodily exercise and examine. In The Sacrifice Game, soft-hearted Rose (Chloë Levine) goals extra towards placation and consolation for her unhappy children.

Photo: Seacia Pavao/Focus Features

And in each instances, these motion pictures full their central trifecta with a personality who helps outline the theme. In The Holdovers, it’s Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary Lamb, the varsity’s cook dinner, freshly mourning her son’s current dying in a navy misadventure, and giving each Paul and Angus a style of what actual tragedy and an precise lifeless finish seem like. They haven’t any method of touching her grief, which places their very own trials into perspective. Samantha and Rose get one thing comparable from Clara (Georgia Acken), a glowering youthful lady who avoids friendship and appears to got down to unnerve everybody round her, for causes that take some time to turn out to be clear.

The two movies diverge sharply from there, although they each characteristic essential street journeys. In Sacrifice Game, it’s an inbound group: a foursome of swaggering serial killers, straight out of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, who wish to take everybody on the college hostage and use the place as a staging floor for a demonic ritual. In Holdovers, it’s an outbound journey, with Paul, Angus, and Mary leaving the varsity on an impromptu Christmas Day go to to Boston.

Obviously, these are very totally different motion pictures. The Holdovers sticks to the prestige-movie path Payne paved the best way for with movies like Nebraska and The Descendants, with Paul and Angus verbally circling one another, hackles up, till they every begin to see what they’ll achieve from dropping their guard. It’s a reasonably leisurely film about opening up, admitting fault and weak point, and trusting different folks.

Sacrifice Game, then again, careens briskly via a home-invasion situation and towards a finale that injects a bit of comedian goofery into what may very well be a lethal boring grim-’n’-gory massacre. Even although it options killers menacing youngsters, a recurring theme of graphic self-mutilation enacted for a wide range of causes (alongside mutilation of harmless victims), and a big physique depend, Sacrifice Game is a a lot lighter film, in its method.

Image: Shudder

But each movies are notable for the best way they take their characters’ pretensions and flaws severely, and the best way their scripts discover layers of which means within the characters’ anxieties and the masks they put on round totally different folks. Sacrifice Game’s smug band of murderers are every hiding numerous private battle, which emerges as the stress will get thicker. It’s not all that dissimilar from the best way Paul and Angus every have histories they’re mendacity about, and apparent disguises — the blustering martinet and the behavior-problem dangerous boy, respectively — they use to deflect any shut examination from a world they resent.

These motion pictures are expressly meant for various audiences. There’s a smirk and a wink-wink submerged humor to Sacrifice Game that makes it really feel like an in-joke shared with the in-the-know horror viewers, whereas Holdovers feels honest to a fault, mining its largest emotional moments out of a way of its characters brushing the rust and the mud off their little-developed talents to be variety. Paul and Angus are each awkward folks, unpracticed at belief, however heartfelt as soon as they have interaction it. Sacrifice Game’s sprawling forged principally heads in the other way.

And but each of those movies additionally really feel like they’re getting down to subvert the concept of the Hallmark Christmas film — the slick, predictable, poreless comfort-viewing expertise the place all of the beats are apparent from the second the title hits the display. They’re each oddball tales about unusual and prickly individuals who can solely discover their vacation cheer in unusual, prickly methods. These motion pictures weren’t made with one another in thoughts, however they make a enjoyable double characteristic, each for the sense of cosmic convergence, and for the sense of two groups of moviemakers approaching comparable concepts with comparable instruments, in wildly other ways.

The Holdovers is in theaters and accessible for premium digital rental now. The Sacrifice Game is streaming solely on Shudder.