I try to go into newer movies completely cold and sometimes with zero expectations, I get very pleasantly surprised. The Ritual is my favorite film of Shocktober so far.
The plot is very simplistic: four college friends in their thirties go backpacking in the wilds of northern Sweden, ostensibly in honor of a fifth member of their group who was killed six months earlier in a convenience store robbery. An attempt at making a shortcut off the marked trails and through a dense forest soon gets the men lost, and as they begin to suffer from frightening dreams and come upon strange artifacts, it’s not long before they realize that something is actually out in those woods...
It’s nothing particular original, and in a post Cabin the Woods film landscape, difficult to be scary without being meta or referential. To me, this is the movie that I wished the Blair Witch Project should have been and combines that movie with a little bit of Wicker Man and touch of the independent horror film Wendigo. Now as mid thirties weekend warrior backpacker, this movie is right in my wheelhouse. I personally appreciated how it treated the forest itself as a presence of enigmatic silence, enormous age, and does have sort of awe of the ancient and unknowable.
Director David Bruckner makes his feature debut here after directing segments in some of the better recent horror anthologies like V/H/S and Southbound. After a quick trip down memory lane (and a Wiki search to remember which segments he directed), Bruckner seemed to have a definite style of coarseness, raw and explicit violence. The Ritual, although definitely having some violent moments, is more of an atmospheric piece.
I really appreciated (and will) that instead of a CGI fest, that the horrors are out of frame, focus, and sight. Also I was stunned that the movie was shot in the Romanian mountains instead of Sweden, but as I have seen both in movies and real life a variety of forests, the location scout found a uniquely dense, oppressive, and even a bit claustrophobic setting for film. I will lastly point to an excellent combination of natural light and shadow, creepy sound design,and handsome cinematography for a smaller budgeted film of Andrew Shulkind.
The four men, led by Rafe Spall (last seen as the villain in Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom) as Luke, are all in fine form, even if there’s less character development for the other three (played by Arsher Ali from Four Lions, Sam Troughton and Robert James-Collier) than Spall. A lingering tension is established among the quartet because Luke was in the store when Rob was murdered and froze in fear, unable to act and possibly save his friend. Resentment over that comes boiling to the surface, of course, with Spall in particular conveying a real sense of grief, anger and guilt. The friends do not fall into the usual tropes as there is no comic relief or smart expository character and do seem like a real group of friends. A big point that the movie doesn't let go is that these people have not been connected for a while and have grown somewhat apart, with the trials in the woods forcing them back together.
A different film and genre with this cast and setting could delve into an interesting look at the dynamics of male friendship. Instead, the film (at a crisp 93 minutes) winds up going for all-out horror, piling on well-worn but still reliable tropes like a spooky cabin, secret cult, ancient rituals, and supernatural powers. Spall and the others navigate it all believably, with one or two of them making sensible choices for the group but sadly another one enacting the inevitable dumb decision that gets them into even worse trouble than they were in.
Without getting into spoiler territory, the look and final reveal of the creature is the highlight of the film. The design is one of the most striking and eerie that I have seen in horror films, not to the iconic level of the Xenomorph from Alien or Pinhead, but firmly in the Relic/Pumpkinhead group of memorable monsters. I can definitely see a lot of discussion and legacy of the Ritual being this antagonist.
Similar to Hush last year, The Ritual was released streaming on Netflix without a U.S. theatrical release (it did show up in the UK theatrically). Given the deluge of Netflix content, I personally worry that this film will be lost in the shuffle. For a spooky, intense and unsettling ride this fall, it's definitely worth a stream. I'd give it a solid 9/10
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