The final countdown: "The Sacrifice"

In the beginning, Tarkovsky's films were somewhat glacial; they were composed of frozen blocks of imagery, refrigerated emotions and memories, which melted at a sometimes perilously slow drip to reveal the intended meaning. By 1986, the year of the Chernobyl explosion, Tarkovsky had decided to bow out in a blaze of glory. The world was on fire, he felt, and all but the smallest glimpse of hope for the future had been obscured by the smoke; nobody was doing anything much to prevent the planet from burning up and some people, indeed, were actively adding fuel to the flames. A man could go mad from watching that. Suffice to say, The Sacrifice presents as no less urgent forty years on - even if urgency isn't quite what the film itself is dealing in. Tarkovsky was in Sweden now, working with an international cast and crew (a young Claire Denis was among the casting assistants), not least Bergman's preferred cinematographer Sven Nykvist, and the director had seemingly metabolised Bergman's mastery of the theatrical and his awareness of the loudly ticking clock. (One of many possible pitches for The Sacrifice: what if Bergman filmed something that related directly to the ongoing Cold War?) In both its set-up and its country-house setting, the film is decidedly Bergmanesque: it opens with a conversation on a desolate shore that invokes Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, so we know things must be getting serious. Our protagonist for the evening is Alexander (Bergman regular Erland Josephson), a sometime actor and critic turned lecturer - the latter proves most significant - who's retired to this brooding stretch of the Baltic Coast with his wife Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood), a mute son (Tommy Kjellqvist) and innumerable signifiers of bourgeois privilege. These will be disrupted, however, by the world beyond the family's front drive, which radio and television reports insist is gearing up for war of some kind; indeed, the final, fatal missiles may already be in the air. In muted colours, Tarkovsky and Nykvist watch as the sun goes permanently down on a world and a way of life; occasional black-and-white inserts, meanwhile, convey some idea of the world after the big bang, while also carrying this filmography back to where it all started. What if the Mirror was shattered? What if Ivan's Childhood had come to a premature end?

Darkly compelling though this premise is, it's largely just a framework for Tarkovsky to fill with what he was actually fretting about as the end of his life neared: a certain helplessness, a growing impotency, a sense he may have outlived civilised history. Like many of Bergman's final works, The Sacrifice is a film out of time; you'll struggle to square it with the fact it emerged in the same century as, say, Short Circuit, let alone the same month. Within a decade, the mantle of Great Arthouse Filmmaker would pass to a generation of Kieślowskis, Almodóvars and Von Triers, flashier, more ironic sensibilities, maestros with marketing degrees. Watching Tarkovsky's characters fussing around dusty maps or swapping old war stories, one is transported back to another era, another place, a moment when our filmmakers were actively encouraged to absorb the best of theatre, painting, literature. The Sacrifice would make an especially apt double-bill with another final film, John Huston's 1987 adaptation of Joyce's The Dead, not least as the latter might have been co-opted as an alternative title for that which Tarkovsky looks out on here. All of which, as the Alexanders of this world will recognise, is criticspeak alerting the reader to the fact The Sacrifice follows a long and winding road to arrive at its eventual destination: one of Tarkovsky's legacies is the consecration of a slower cinema, consciously pushing back against the myriad mindless accelerations of the modern world. The extra time on offer led this viewer to the jolting realisation that The Sacrifice adheres to more or less the same narrative line as Steve De Jarnatt's poppy L.A. story Miracle Mile, released two years later: guy learns that the end of the world is nigh, then has to figure out what to do with the time still available to him. Where De Jarnatt cast Anthony Edwards - Goose out of Top Gun, later Mark Greene from e.r. - as a workaday Everyman, Tarkovsky plumped for the altogether loftier Josephson to portray a man of learning, a stand-in for an ailing director, an artist in exile who, if he's lucky, has another couple of hours to communicate before he utters his final word. These characters will spend those hours mostly talking, which again opens the film up to charges of windiness - but then talking is all these folks can do in the circumstances: they try and reckon with a situation that is fundamentally out of their hands, or make peace with their fates, or offer up screams, last gasps and hail Marys. There are stretches of writing here that prove so honest and so raw it's almost as though we're sat at the bedside of the dying; and we're also now aware, as viewers of the time possibly wouldn't have been, that this was the last occasion Tarkovsky could talk to us (and to his son, referenced in the film's coda). Unlike the vibrant Miracle Mile, The Sacrifice is, almost needless to say, little to no fun to watch - or, rather, it's exactly as much fun as being sealed in a house with people who know they're not long for this world promises - but it does mean what it's saying, sincerely and absolutely, in a way so many modern films don't. Our movies haven't got smaller over these past four decades, but they have lost weight - the great, wrenching gravity of belief Tarkovsky expresses in every last frame here.

The Sacrifice is now playing in selected cinemas, and available to stream via Prime Video and Curzon Home Cinema.