A note before you read: this post touches on suicide and assisted death. If you're struggling, you're not alone, and help is available. Call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline).
Spoiler alert: if you want to watch Sacrifice on Netflix for yourself, this will completely and utterly spoil it for you.
I was looking for something light to watch, and I saw a new movie, Sacrifice, on Netflix, advertised as a comedy. That's the only reason I turned it on. What I got instead was a deep mental health drama. No comedy at all.
I'm not writing this to tell you to stop watching things. I'm not saying don't watch, don't engage, don't let a story unsettle you. I want you to pay attention. Watch with your eyes open, and notice what a story is quietly asking you to accept as good.
The story centers on a cult that believes a volcano is going to erupt in two days and destroy the planet. The volcano supposedly speaks to a young woman in the group. At first it tells her that her parents must die, and we see her mother being burned alive. Then it tells her she needs to go out and find three people, a king, a pure love, and a hero, who also need to be sacrificed to the volcano. The king turns out to be a powerful, wealthy man with convictions of his own. The pure love turns out to be something the story shouldn't be calling pure at all, her own brother's love for his sister, still treated as valid enough to matter to the volcano. Once all three are found, it will stop.
What stayed with me was the ending. First they throw the king into the volcano, killing him. He never asked to be there. Unlike the other two, he wasn't a willing sacrifice, they simply took him and threw him in. His last words were something like, tell my wife I never cried. He went in without breaking. Of the three of them, he's the one I'd actually call a hero, the one who never dropped his convictions, even while being murdered for someone else's belief. Then they carry the woman running the cult out to the volcano's edge on a stretcher. She's terrified the whole way there, crying, clearly not wanting this. But once she's standing at the edge, something shifts in her. She stops crying. She goes still, almost serene, like she's just found some kind of enlightenment. And she doesn't jump. She lets herself fall forward into it. Then one more person goes in willingly. The hero, he'd been called that from the very beginning, long before he ever did anything heroic, like the label itself was setting him up for what he'd eventually do. He isn't some side character who shows up already willing. He's an actor who had a nervous breakdown within the past year, still grieving his father's recent death, so the loss is new and raw for him. The film doesn't just drop him at the volcano's edge. It walks you through his whole arc, slowly, convincing him, and you along with him, that his death would mean something good. By the time he gets there, he believes it. That's not a man making a sudden, isolated choice. That's a man who was already vulnerable, led step by step to believe his own death is heroic. The real hero never got the title. The man who was handed it never earned it, he was just told it so many times he started to believe it. The whole time a crowd is watching live, everyone in shock, and then the volcano just dies down. Calm. Resolved. And I kept thinking, since when is this normal?
That's not a new lie, the idea that giving yourself over to death is enlightenment, or that blood calms the earth so everyone else gets to be safe. The pagan gods always demanded that kind of payment to keep the rain coming and the ground still. Scripture tells a very different story. God stopped Abraham's hand before it ever reached Isaac. He called child sacrifice to Molech something that never even entered His mind (Jeremiah 7:31). The Old Testament is full of sacrifice, yes, but never human sacrifice. It was animal sacrifice, a covering that pointed forward to something greater still to come. Our God never asked for a human sacrifice from us. He became that sacrifice Himself, once, so nothing and no one else would ever have to be offered again.
That's the part that should concern people most. Media guidelines on suicide, the kind researchers and journalists are actually trained on, specifically warn against portraying it as heroic, as solving something, as earning admiration, because stories that frame it that way have been shown to influence vulnerable viewers. This film does exactly that. A man already in crisis, walked gently toward believing his death is a gift. Whether the people who made it meant to send that message or not, that's the message it sends.
It isn't only the sacrifice-to-save-everyone framing that bothers me. It's the specific shape these deaths take on screen, from terror to that eerie calm, dying framed as a gift they're giving everyone else, almost a kindness. We're already watching this show up outside of fiction, in places like Canada and the Netherlands, where assisted death has expanded to include people who aren't terminally ill, sometimes framed as relieving a burden on family or society. I don't know if entertainment sets out to connect to that on purpose. But when something like this leaks into a story and we watch it dressed up as peace, as enlightenment, as a favor to the people you love, we get a little more used to it. And used to it is how something monstrous starts to look normal.
I keep coming back to how this hits a person across husk, soul, and spirit, the lens I use for everything in this work. The husk, the body, is what dies in that volcano, but that's not where the damage actually starts. The soul, the mind and will, goes first, convinced somewhere along the way that this is right, that dying here solves something. The spirit, not the Holy Spirit, but the part of us built to reach for something higher, gets pointed at the volcano instead of at God, treating that mountain as though it holds real spiritual authority, something worth surrendering to. Once the spirit is aimed at the wrong thing, the soul follows, and the husk pays the price last. That's usually the order. The enemy doesn't come for the body first. He comes for the spirit, convinces the soul, and the body just carries out what's already been decided somewhere deeper.
