Tarkovsky’s final film and his ultimate metaphysical testament, The Sacrifice merges the vivid experience of a nuclear attack with the disintegration of a writer’s family and in so doing, merges dream with reality, sanity with madness. Filled with powerful images that resist simple narrative explication, the film portrays the isolation of the artistic sensibility and the potential for disaster that the human race has inflicted on itself. Shot in Sweden with cinematographer Sven Nykvist and featuring Bergman regular Erland Josephson as the central character (explicitly likened to the protagonist of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot), the film is a profoundly disturbing and yet, in its final moments, uplifting work.