The Ritual – ***½

The Ritual (David Bruckner, 2017) – All Foreign Rights – Horror

Reported Acquisition Price: $4.75 million

 

Four longtime friends decide to go on a hiking trip in Northern Sweden, in large part to honor the memory of their friend Rob (Paul Reid) who was killed during an armed robbery at a convenience store in the film’s opening scenes. One of the friends in particular – Luke (Rafe Spall) – is guilt-stricken over Rob’s death as he was in the store with him at the time of the robbery but didn’t intervene to help his friend. Once they’re on the trip, the group of friends decide to leave the marked trails after one of them hurts his knee. They take a shortcut through the woods and discover little by little that there is something mysterious lurking in the area they’ve wandered in to.

The Ritual is a bit of a victim of the Netflix publicity machine as it is a good genre film that was overhyped by journalists covering the company and its films. An article in Indie Wire is a case in point, calling the film a “sleeper hit” and offering tweets from celebrities to verify this. (Significantly, a couple of these surely unbiased endorsers, such as Guillermo Del Toro and Mike Flanagan, had ongoing business relationships with Netflix itself.) The film is good, but it can’t – and shouldn’t have to – live up to this degree of celebration.

Don’t get me wrong, The Ritual is a perfectly good, fun horror film. The atmosphere is menacing, you will genuinely jump at several points and some of the nightmare images are truly terrifying. My favorite scene in this regard involves the friends spending a night in an abandoned cabin only to find themselves having nightmares about a mysterious idol. They then awake to find one of their own kneeling naked in front of for reasons that he can’t recall. For this reason, this is a recommendable genre film and even one that is slightly above average.

But this is not sleeper hit material. The film is flawed in a number of ways, beginning with how familiar and even clichéd some of the plot twists are. This is particularly seen in the fateful decision to take the shortcut, one that will be met with guffaws by any true horror aficionado. At this moment, I really wished I was watching the film back in Trinidad (where I lived for a time). Audiences there know how to treat such contrivances and I would have loved to hear the crowd at a theater yelling “allyuh go dead!” back at the screen. Similar moments occur throughout the remainder of the film as the group shrinks and keeps debating whether or not to go back to the right path or whether or not to sleep in what seem to be the world’s scariest emptiest cabins. And of course you can guess how well their decisions turn out.

Another, arguably, bigger flaw in the film is the reveal of what has been going on. I don’t want to spoil this, but suffice it to say that it was for me a let down. The menacing atmosphere of the forest and the slow attrition of the group was terrifying and it was anticlimactic to get an explanation of what was actually happening. (Much like another overrated recent horror: Hereditary.) This was part of what made the first Blair Witch so good, it never showed you all of the monsters and let your imagination do the rest. The Ritual didn’t just lose its mystique at this moment, but it also changed genres and went from horror to something like an escape thriller, which it wasn’t too good at.

All that said, if you manage your expectations properly, this is a good film for those looking for a good fright. Don’t expect a masterpiece and you won’t be disappointed.

 

Netflix Tendencies

Limited Locations and Small Cast

This is yet another men wandering in the woods movie. Netflix released a lot of them in 2018 and I seem to have reviewed a bunch of them already for whatever reason (see Calibre, Hold the Dark, etc.). Anyway, in this case, I am sure this kept costs down – they even used the Romanian forest to substitute for Sweden – but it also worked to generate claustrophobic tension even though the characters were outdoors.

The shrinking group of friends also worked well in the film, as the dynamics between this small group of characters were developed well.

Notable Corporate Alliance

Entertainment One financed and distributed the film. This is a company that produces films with an eye towards distributing within one or more of their own territories (currently the UK, Canada, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain). What they have been doing in some cases is selling all the other territorial rights for some films to Netflix. They have therefore supplied several films to the service, including Message from the King and David Brent: Life on the Road. In the case of The Ritual, they retained UK rights where the film grossed about £1 million.

EOne, as they like to be called, have also produced at least one other full original for Netflix (Sand Castle) and sold a number of original series to them as well, most recently Designated Survivor but they will soon also be working on the extended Narnia universe with Netflix .

Netflix Stars

Andy Serkis is an executive producer on this film. He is directing two other films that will ultimately end up being Netflix originals: Mowgli and Animal Farm.