The Sacrifice Game and The Holdovers are 2023’s best Christmas double feature
When the film world gets one of its unexpected cross-studio theme pairings — the way summer 1998 offered two “impending planetary apocalypse” movies in Armageddon and Deep Impact, or 2022 gave us two major Pinocchio movies — it’s rarely clear on the surface whether the projects stem from corporate copycatting, divergent evolution, or sheer coincidence. Ultimately, it’s rarely worth debating: What matters is whether the films are enjoyable and well-made, and whether they screen better together.
2023’s best strange pairing in that vein is an unexpected one: Alexander Payne’s touching found-family movie The Holdovers and Jenn Wexler’s creepy horror movie The Sacrifice Game, now on Shudder,turn out to be a surprisingly apt double feature — even if they’re using similar plotlines to very different ends.
Both movies are set at Christmas within a year of each other: The Holdovers in 1970, The Sacrifice Game in 1971. Both revolve around remote, single-gender boarding schools, where one unlucky teacher and a few disconsolate students are left behind to make whatever they can out of Christmas break after everyone else heads out for the holidays. Both are built around a series of surprising reveals, as some broad archetypal characters reveal hidden layers and hidden intentions. And both feature those teachers and students making surprising emotional connections with each other.
Only one of them brings in a group of serial killers trying to summon a demon in order to claim its raw, unbridled power, though. Watching the trailers for both movies, it’s easy to guess which one.
What’s particularly enjoyable about watching these two movies back-to-back is that they’re both such warmly well-intentioned movies about the melancholy feeling
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