It helps, when watching the stunning catharsis of The Sacrifice, to know that the director Andrei Tarkovsky made it while in exile from the Soviet Union—and was dying, but didn't realize it yet. The film feels like a final gesture, trembling in the gap between the immediate and the cosmic. Whatever Tarkovsky's balletically long shots are watching—an old man and his son on the seaside, or a wife slowly clacking her way across a wood floor with barely concealed scorn, or a servant trembling at the certainty that they're all about to die in a nuclear holocaust—they radiate both grandiosity and humility, mourning and loving. At the risk of sounding grandiose, The Sacrifice aches like a bittersweet break-up letter from an artist to life itself. Soon after completing the film in late 1985, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

The film's doomed protagonist is a pompous, then tragically humbled, Swedish writer named Alexander who, for his birthday, plants a withered tree with his tiny son (who's been rendered mute by a tonsil operation) just beyond their lovely home with an ocean view. He holds forth to his boy, the friendly mailman, and anyone else within earshot about impermanence, gloom, consciousness, his own tendency to talk too much, why he abandoned acting, and how our supposedly advanced civilization has only given us two curses, disguised as gifts: stupefying "comfort" and the "instruments of violence" to defend our stupefaction. Then he, and his family and servants and friends (including a doctor who's probably having an affair with Alexander's wife), prepare for the birthday supper.

That's all exposition and philosophical foundation-pouring for what comes next: the end of the world and Alexander's first attempt at prayer in years.

The Sacrifice starts off Chekhov, warms up to Ibsen, and then goes full-on King Lear. That is, it begins with languid, bourgeois boredom, stumbles into sinister domestic turmoil, and then erupts into dramatic, supernatural cataclysm. Tarkovsky keeps punctuating his extended shots in the frosty green light of the Swedish coast with sudden crashes (sometimes comically): the son's face into the back of his father's head, a door slamming in the wind, bicycles falling over, a milk pitcher shattering on the floor, clumsy expectations and misunderstandings smashing into reality.

"I've waited all my life for this," Alexander mutters, sounding almost relieved, when the apocalypse comes. The catastrophe he is staring into is the big one that comes to us all. The Sacrifice was Tarkovsky's last film.