‘Sacrifice’ (PG)

NO BEATING about the booshska: "Sacrifice" is tough. It's an allegory and features Swedish people talking death and alienation, in Swedish. But if you fight your way through, you may just feel the flush of achievement and walk away with a head full of memorable images.

The late Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky was widely known as a "visionary" -- meaning he gave full vent to his imagination and asked questions later. In any case, you won't leave "Sacrifice" (winner of last year's Jury Prize at Cannes) indifferent to or without respect for his cinematic eloquence. He aims for the left brain -- not the side that calculates Metro fares or helps you parallel-park.

"Sacrifice" is about The End. But you see no mushroom clouds, pestilence or Situation Rooms. Instead, Tarkovsky protracts and magnifies the horror of an impending World War III by showing one family's reaction to the news.

The family, a collection of ennui-racked people, lives on a remote Swedish island -- "Sacrifice" was shot on Faro n, Ingmar Bergman's exiled residence -- and is headed by Alexander (Erland Josephson), an aging, pontificating professor. While his family reacts to the Prime Minister's war announcement with catatonic resignation, Alexander makes a desperate bid to change fate in this foreboding drang before the stu rm.

Tarkovsky leaves us free-floating in Alexander's subjective world from this point on. In a set of dreamlike sequences, he sleeps with one of his maids and saves the world. But the family he returns to is far from reborn. He has little choice but to go mad.

If Tarkovsky is the film's omniscient creator, Sven Nykvist's unparalleled cinematography is the spirit. Bergman's former cameraman gives the film awesome import with exquisite tracking shots and a chromatic descent into black and white as the world deteriorates. Tarkovsky pulls you into a dark, foreboding nightmare and Nykvist gives that nightmare an explosive awakening. -- Desson Howe. SACRIFICE (PG) -- At the Biograph.