Director: Jenn Wexler
Snowbound at an empty boarding school on Christmas Eve, two students find that the quietest night of the year can turn into the longest one they've ever lived through.
What is The Sacrifice Game about?
It's 1971, and while most of the students at Blackvale Academy have gone home for the holidays, Samantha and Clara are among the handful left behind. The halls are dim, the phone lines are unreliable, and the isolation that felt peaceful at first starts to feel deliberate. When a group of uninvited visitors arrives after dark with an agenda that has nothing to do with holiday cheer, the two girls have to figure out fast who they can trust inside the building and what the strangers outside actually want. Director Jenn Wexler builds the tension slowly, leaning on candlelit corridors and half-heard footsteps before the night tips into something far more dangerous, testing whether an unlikely friendship formed under pressure can hold long enough to see sunrise.
Cast & crew
Georgia Acken and Olivia Scott Welch anchor the film as the two students forced to rely on each other, with Mena Massoud, Gus Kenworthy, Chloë Levine, Derek Johns, Laurent Pitre, and Madison Baines rounding out the group of visitors whose motives unfold gradually across the night.
Context & significance
Released in 2023 and shot as a US-Canada co-production, the film sits in the slow-burn horror-thriller tradition, favoring dread, candlelight, and atmosphere over jump scares. The early-1970s period setting and the snowed-in, near-empty campus do much of the heavy lifting, turning an ordinary boarding school into a place where every closed door feels like a decision. Critics have noted the way the story lets its two leads carry long stretches of near-silence, letting small details accumulate before the pace shifts.
Where & how to watch
The Sacrifice Game is available to watch on K-Time with a free account login, including Farsi dubbing and Persian subtitles for viewers who prefer to follow the story in Farsi. The K-Time interface itself is fully in Farsi, built for the Iranian diaspora audience.