Format: Streaming video from Pluto TV on various players.
The Ritual is one of those movies that feels like you’ve seen in pieces before. There are moments that are directly reminiscent of other films, places where other films have borrowed from it, and allusions to films that don’t on the surface have a lot to do with this one. Among the films that I could see shining through in The Ritual are The Blair Witch Project, King Kong, The Grey and The Descent. I also recognized films like Annihilation, Antlers and Midsommar, but these were released after The Ritual, making this a potential influence more than anything else.
We start out with a group of five guys in a pub deciding what they want to do as a group vacation. Every suggestion eventually gets shot down. The last one under discussion is a hiking trip through Sweden suggested by Rob (Paul Reid). Shortly thereafter, as Rob and Luke (Rafe Spall) go into a liquor store to buy wine, Rob is killed in a robbery gone wrong.
Six months later, Luke, Phil (Arsher Ali), Hutch (Robert James-Collier), and Dom (Sam Troughton) are hiking through Sweden as a way to honor their friend. A misstep injures Dom’s knee, with the group a good 14 hours from the safety of the lodge they left from. With Dom hobbled, Hutch suggests that rather than walking on the path all the way back to the lodge, they instead cut through the forest on a more direct path, figuring that having a map and a compass will be enough to get them home safely.
You can see where this is going, right? Deep into the forest, the group is going to come across a gutted elk hung in a tree and bizarre symbols carved into the trees around them. They eventually find a cabin and decide to spend the night there, but find some very disturbing contents. The strangest is a human torso made of sticks and twigs. It has no head and has antlers for hands. That night, everyone has terrifying dreams. Luke awakens to find a series of puncture wounds in his chest, while Phil is found naked, prostrated before the weird figure.
What happens from here is not going to be a huge surprise. The group is going to continue going deeper and deeper into the forest and things are going to get more and more disturbing as they continue. They will see glimpses of something huge in the forest. And as you might expect, our group of hikers is going to start getting picked off and then discovered impaled on tree branches much like the elk that was found earlier.
With any movie like The Ritual, the problem more than anything is going to be that there aren’t really a lot of places of this to go. The real question, ultimately, is who is going to be our effective “final girl” when the creature that has been pursuing them finally makes its appearance on screen. We know where it’s going; what we don’t know is when and how, and that’s what the movie is all about. Who is going to be targeted next? When is it going to happen?
This is where The Ritual really succeeds. We may not know the actual last few minutes of the film (there are only a couple of ways it can go) and we don’t know who is going to be there, but getting there is going to be interesting. The Ritual is all about the slow build of tension and then brief moments of shock and terror. It does this surprisingly well. Much of what works is the fact that we as the audience don’t really know what is going on, and we’re not going to find out until the third act. In the watching of the movie, we often forget what the movie is called, and that’s important for making this work. Once we get to the moment when we remember what the movie is called, it all makes sense.
It's also worth saying that the creature in The Ritual is a stand-out. We’ll get glimpses of it here and there, but when it finally does show up, it’s worth the wait. Often, this is the moment that ruins the movie—the monster doesn’t live up to scrutiny, or isn’t as scary as we want it to be. That’s not the case here; it’s a winner.
My problems with The Ritual are technical ones. There are times when it is very dark and difficult to see what is happening. That makes some sense with the characters being in the forest, but the audience isn’t in the forest, and we want to see what is happening. We’re already in a movie with a giant forest beast; I can live with a little break from reality in terms of having things better lit.
Overall, though, this is a solid watch. It’s picking the bones of a lot of other movies, but it’s picking the right ones and using them well.
Why to watch The Ritual: Other people’s religions are terrifying
Why not to watch: There are a few places that are hard to see because of a lack of lighting.
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