The Ritual
The Ritual paints a picture of a demon that can haunt us the most throughout life: ourselves. It does a wonderful job of slowly easing the viewer into the twisted dimension its created. As our characters descend deeper into the mountains and the forest on their unforgettable trip, their sanity slowly begins to unravel simultaneously. It’s not riddled with jump scares, but is still very eerie as the movie progresses. The themes, settings, and relationships in this movie weave together expertly and make this film a fantastic viewing experience.
We are all guilty of something, whether we admit it or not. For Ritual, the guilt lies within Luke, a man deeply traumatized from a small-time convenience store robbery that left one of his best friend, Rob, dead. However, it’s not exactly the robbers who scarred him, but rather, his own inability to act in the moment to attempt to save his friend when he had the chance to. We see flashes of his guilt throughout the movie and this becomes the emotional crux of the film. Luke and his mutual friends of Rob go on a hiking trip that they dedicate to their passed friend.
Their journey gets increasingly weird and disturbing when they decide to take a shortcut through the mountains to find civilization early because of a mishap. Sort of like how you shouldn’t take shortcuts in life (maybe you should confront your guilt head-first), you shouldn’t take uncharted shortcuts on demonic mountain trips as well.
Guilt is a theme explored among our characters as they try to grip with the loss of Rob. It provokes questions that we probably should consider when thinking about traumatic events, such as: “Is it right to blame someone for their inaction?” There’s a grey area when trying to decide who’s at fault, however, one thing is for certain: if you do not confront your guilt and fight it, it will tear you up inside like a parasite. If you succumb to the darkness of your mind, you may literally (according to the movie) live with your guilt forever. It is best that we face our guilt, no matter how large it could be.
The first two acts have all the facets of a great horror movie. With an unsettling environment and characters with a will to fight, Ritual pays off with a psychologically mind-blowing final act. While I wasn’t too frightened during my viewing, it had me thinking about deeper topics and issues that made me connect with our characters more. This is always a good thing in movies and I will not argue this! More movies should sacrifice cheap plot devices to get us caring about the characters. I also really loved how you only saw glimpses of the horrific “beast” that was torturing our group. It really added an omnipresent, looming atmosphere to the claustrophobic group.
Ritual was a fantastic British film that explored paganism, sacrifice, and guilt among the backdrop of the beautiful mountains of Sweden. I hope to see more movies like this where I’m not exactly sure how the movie is ending even if I know where the movie is headed. I would recommend this movie to anybody with a functioning heart and a taste for horror.
7/10
Best,
Frank
