The Ritual: Not Actually About A Ritual

One really important element in scary movies is that of human frailty. There are a bunch of ways it can figure in, from being the centerpiece of some theatrical villain’s cack-handed attempt at a social experiment, to providing a moment of betrayal at the worst possible moment, to being something overcome over the course of the film, or something not overcome, leading to a grim end. It’s like any other ingredient in a story. Sometimes it’s deployed well and adds to the final product, and sometimes it’s all you can taste.

The Ritual is one of those times when it’s all you can taste, and boy is it bland.

The film opens on five friends out at the pub, discussing an upcoming trip. They’re debating where they want to go, and more than once a location is shot down because they’re getting too old for that particular type of fun. They’re old college buddies, uneasily settling into the idea that they can’t party like they used to and still unsure of what takes its place. Two of them - Rob and Luke - head down the street to a corner shop so Rob can grab a bottle of something, because Rob’s not done partying yet. The back-and-forth continues between them before they realize that this shop is in the middle of being robbed. Luke ducks behind some shelves, Rob isn’t so lucky. The robbers demand his wallet, his watch. He doesn’t want to give them the watch. They threaten him. Luke looks down at the bottle of booze he’s holding, weighs his chances at clocking the robbers before they notice him.

Luke does nothing, and Rob gets beaten to death.

Flash forward six months later, and the four remaining friends - Luke, Dom, Hutch, and Phil - are on a hiking holiday in rural Sweden. It’s what Rob would have wanted. Not so much what they wanted - they’re city boys, it’s cold and rainy and windy, and sleeping in tents sucks. But they’re doing it for Rob. Something hangs between them all - Rob’s absence, and the reason for it. So there’s tension, discomfort, maybe some lingering resentment and guilt. There’s also weather and a long, long hike to their lodge, and to top it all off, Dom takes a spill and fucks up his knee. So they decide to go off-trail, to cut through forest in order to get back to warm beds, cold drinks, and thick steaks sooner rather than later.

Now, this is a terrible idea under any circumstances - none of them are really outdoorsy, and trails are there for a reason - and soon enough our protagonists find themselves really fucking lost in the woods. Night falls, and the rain starts to come down even harder. That’s when they stumble on a cabin. Oh, sure, it looks like nobody’s used it in ages, and there are runes carved in the trees outside, which is weird, and there’s a creepy pagan effigy in the attic, which is even weirder, but it’s shelter for the night. So they bed down for the night. None of them sleep well at all.

And when they wake, they find Phil, still in the throes of a nightmare, naked and praying to the effigy in his sleep.

So we have four friends, a grudge hanging between them, out of their depth in nature, faced with some really, really weird shit. On the surface, then, it plays like a distaff version of The Descent. You have a bunch of people out in the untamed wilds who are going to need to cooperate to survive, but there are things between them that will make that difficult. And like The Descent, as their situation gets worse, hints of something worse than nature’s monumental indifference start to creep in. The thing is, in The Descent all of the stuff that happened before gets backgrounded in favor of the immediate problems, only rearing its head in the climax. It’s not about what came before, but what came before informs how everything turns out, and this is really effective. The Ritual, on the other hand, is entirely about what came before. It gets brought up in a heated argument early on, Luke has repeated nightmares that he’s back in the corner shop, and it’s really on-the-nose to begin with, and the nightmare becomes a motif repeated what feels like three or four times throughout the film. And it’s like I know, I was there at the beginning of the movie.

As a result, the whole film feels less like a story about people who’ve already suffered one horror plunged into another, and more like a referendum on what Luke did (or rather didn’t do) that fateful night in the corner shop. By hammering us over the head with the inciting tragedy repeatedly over the film’s run time, it becomes entirely a story about whether or not Luke chickens out again. Everyone else becomes a prop in what is now Luke’s redemption/condemnation arc, and anything that happens in the film becomes something that exists to get us to that moment instead of being an absorbing story. It’s easy for this conceit to overpower everything else in the film, because the rest of the film isn’t especially strong stuff on its own. The four friends are barely sketched out (Dom’s the wimp, Hutch is the most competent, Phil is kind of there, and Luke let his friend die in case you didn’t know), and though they aren’t made out to be bad sorts, they don’t make much of an impression either. Their emotional range is from scared to angry for the most part, and the impact of what exactly happened the night Rob died on all of them is never really explored -- they keep yelling at each other about it, but that’s all they do. There’s no sense of how it affected each of them individually, and Luke seems less conflicted or traumatized by it than just sort of sullen and annoyed that people keep bringing it up.

And this ends up undercutting what the film does well. It’s well-established early on that these guys have very little business hiking in rural Sweden, even less business going off-trail, and the night in the weird cabin does do a good job of establishing just how out of their depth they are. If the filmmakers had focused on that aspect of the story, and let what we know about what happened between these four guys sort of hang in the air between them, it would have been a much stronger showing. In the early running, it gets over on lots of time spend in the forest at night, the yawning dark broken only by trees and fitful flashlights. There are a few ominous indicators that maybe they shouldn’t be out here, and there’s a lot to be wrung from an endless ocean of trees, the strange sounds of a forest at night, and maps and compasses that do no good at all, as The Blair Witch Project aptly demonstrated. But it doesn’t focus on that primal fear either. After that weird night in the cabin, the focus shifts to a mysterious creature out in the woods. So now when it isn’t about Luke letting Rob die (which he did, the film hastens to remind us), it’s about some unseen monster stalking them, so that initial unease gets replaced with a lot of sound effects and people vanishing into the forest.

For that matter, I spent about two-thirds of the film saying to myself “why did they call this film The Ritual?” and lo and behold, the third act is less a culmination of everything that came before and more the filmmakers realizing that they had to reconcile a weird cabin in the woods and an unseen monster with the title The Ritual, and that they were in danger of killing off all of their protagonists seriously short of a 90-minute runtime. So they stall for a bit with an exposition dump that amounts to a single character explaining everything to Luke while the whole film grinds to a halt. The climax, when things should be at their most horrifying, mostly takes place in shadows and firelight, but the feeling of contrivance means it comes across less atmospheric than out of a need to keep the monster as hidden as possible because it wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny. 

The whole thing ends with sort of a shrug. and feels less like something was survived or endured than it does like an awkward, exasperating night with some acquaintances just came to an end and now you’re annoyed because you know you’re going to have a hangover and you can’t find a cab. We’re reminded over and over again that Luke let someone die, and we are told that this is important, but at the end, it isn’t, not really. If you’re going to make it the point of the movie, that point should be sharp.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix