Raindance Film Festival 2026: Sacrificios

After the tragic death of his young son, Andrés (Siddhartha Tonalli), Juan (Jorge A Jiménez) kayaks out to sea to escape his grief in Mexican director Mauricio Chernovetsky’s Aztec folk horror Sacrificios. When a supernatural force leads Juan to discover the body of his still-living son in the water, the pair make their way to a nearby deserted island where Juan learns that his child now has an insatiable hunger for blood.

In a similar vein to Caye Casas’s The Coffee Table, Chernovetsky uses the death of a child to tap into themes of grief and parenthood to profoundly human effect. Whereas the 2022 Spanish feature explores the premise as a domestic black comedy, Sacrificios functions as a hypnotic fairy tale coloured with strange and disturbing imagery. Despite Jiménez delivering a tour-de-force performance, the feature struggles to get out of second gear once the father and son arrive on the island.

The filmmaker establishes the emotional stakes early. Andrés’s accident is suspensefully foreshadowed and harrowing to witness. Audiences feel every ounce of Juan’s pain as images of Andrés’s body replay in his head and experience his dumbfounded exhilaration when he’s reunited with the child. Jiménez does an outstanding job at conveying the complex emotions the character wrestles with. Even when he comes to understand the sinister reality of his situation, he remains unable to break free from his guilt.

Although the feature contains a handful of unexpected scares, the horror predominantly stems from its feverish atmosphere. There’s an otherworldly quality to the island where dreams and reality collide. The harsh rocky landscape where the pair take refuge is punctuated by intoxicating neon colours, and a sublime score from Jason Carmer moves from ominous synths to Hitchcockian strings. Surreal imagery begins to creep in as Juan’s own nightmares gnaw at his conscience. As thematically rich as this feature is, there’s no escalation to the terror, which leaves the distinctive Aztec angle feeling underutilised in what becomes an underwhelming resolution to its slow-burn approach.

At its core, Sacrificios is an often-mesmerising study of grief and parenthood that’s carried by a powerhouse turn from Jiménez. Given how brilliantly Chernovetsky sets up the script’s emotional core and surreal atmosphere, it’s disappointing that the feature is unable to capitalise on its unique folk horror premise to deliver a satisfying payoff.