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The Ritual Movie Review

The Ritual is a 2017 British supernatural folk horror film directed by David Bruckner and starring Rafe Spall. It’s a familiar, but pretty solid genre flick.

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“If the shortcut was a shortcut,

it wouldn’t be called a shortcut,

it would be called a route“

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A trip to the Swedish wilderness turns murky as four friends try to mend their strained relationships. However, in the forest, they realize that they are not alone. This is a very familiar movie, one that is obviously inspired by ‘The Blair Witch Project’, but thankfully with no found footage elements. There are also elements of folk horror movies of yesteryear with the film being set in the Swedish wilderness and focusing on a creature from Norse Mythology.

The movie benefits heavily from the focus on its roster of British travelers. While stronger character development was definitely needed, what we got was still solid for a horror flick. Individually, they weren’t particularly well developed, but as a group they were very effective. The dialogue was particularly grounded and believable.

The actors did a very good job, but clearly the standout was Rafe Spall in the most important role in the film and the best written one. He was excellent and his character’s arc was quite strong. There is a solid exploration of grief and shame and certainly those hallucination sequences were the most powerful moments here. One of them in particular was phenomenal – both eerie and emotionally effective.

What I also appreciated here was the creature design. The eventual creature reveal came quite late in the game, which was a great choice as it led to fantastic build-up. It’s a smartly constructed movie that mostly worked. The folk elements were fantastic and the creature was original, memorable and quite creepy.

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But The Ritual ultimately would have fared maybe better with just the hallucinations and no creature present. It felt like two different stories mashed into one. And although I liked them both, they still felt a bit too disparate for my taste. The cult parts were especially rushed and underutilized. But its excellent cinematography made perfect use of its wonderfully eerie and ancient Scandinavian setting while the score and sound are also terrific.