The Ritual
(2017)
Dir. David Bruckner
Written by Joe
Barton, based on the book by Adam Nevill
Starring Rafe Spall, Arsher Ali,
Robert James-Collier, Sam Troughton
THE SIGNAL is a 2014 American science fiction thriller
directed by William Euban and starring Brenton Thwaites and Laurence Fish… no
wait, that’s not it, what I meant to say is THE SIGNAL is a 1998 road-trip
dramedy about life on an American Indian reservation based on the stories of
Sherman Alexi… wait, no, that’s, that’s SMOKE SIGNALS. What I’m actually
thinking about is 2007’s horror-anthology THE SIGNAL, which found rookie
directors David Bruckner, Dan Bush, and Jacob Gentry taking turns directing
vignettes centering on the aftermath of a mysterious television signal which
drives most of the population insane. If you are confused, I don’t blame you.
This is why you give your movies original names,
people.
Anyway, THE SIGNAL (2007) was one of the most intense, effective modern
horror movies I had seen in a good long time back when it came out, and I was
really jazzed to see what each of the three directors would follow it up with.
But it turned out to be a long wait. Gentry did a series of MTV movies called My
Super Sweet Psycho 16 which sounded terrible and I never bothered with,
Bush did some movie called THE RECONSTRUCTION OF WILLIAM ZERO in 2014 which I’m
just now learning about as I’m writing this, and the dopey James Franco
ghost/heist mash-up THE VAULT in 2017. And Bruckner, who did the obvious
standout vignette in THE SIGNAL, did… almost nothing. A couple short films and
anthology segments, but so little of note that I ended up forgetting all about
him. And then, without any hype or anything, whammo, suddenly THE RITUAL is on
Netflix.
THE RITUAL is a 1977 survival/horror flick starring Hal
Holbrook and... wait no, actually I mean THE RITUAL is a 2002 Tales From The
Crypt movie with Jennifer Grey and Craig Sheffe… no no, scratch that, it’s
a 2002 Filipino thriller, or.. Wait, wait, actually it’s a surrealistic 2015
Russian-German co-production, or… goddamn it, this is why you
give your movies original names, people! There are well over 100 movies
and TV shows with that name or a similar derivation of it listed on IMDB. And I
bet none of those other ones ends with (mild spoiler?) a Scandinavian
demigod that lives in a moose’s face (more on that later). I refuse to believe
the makers of this movie thought the fact that a ritual happens was the most noteworthy
thing here.
(There were two movies named SOLO in 2018 alone. The
cheap irony alone should have been enough to scare one of them off).
Anyway, 2017’s THE RITUAL is Bruckner’s first-ever
full-length directorial gig, and if it lacks the breathless ferocity of his
segment in THE SIGNAL, it’s still an unusually strong and vivid little
exercise, sticking comfortably to tried-and-true horror formula but providing
enough texture and imagination to make it distinct. Considering Netflix’s
extraordinary, almost unbelievable track record of taking exciting directors
and facilitating turgid disappointments (Kim Jee-Woon, Duncan Jones, Jeremy
Saulnier, Jonas Åkerlund, Martin Zandvliet, Adam Wingard and David Mackenzie are all among its
victims), just having this come out pretty good seems almost like a miracle.
The premise is simple enough: four old friends get
together for a hiking trip in Sweden in the wake of the death of a fifth
friend, who was fatally beaten during a random robbery while one of them (Luke,
played by Rafe Spall, ANONYMOUS) watched helplessly (if it had been Steven Seagal in there, this movie would have gone in a very different direction). That’s already a pretty
grim reason for a get-together, and the austere Swedish wilderness ain’t
exactly lightening the mood, so there’s some tension brewing not very deep
below the surface. Petulant, whiny loudmouth Dom (Sam Troughton AVP: ALIEN VS.
PREDATOR) openly blames Luke for the tragedy, and while Phil (Arsher Ali, FOUR
LIONS) and Hutch (Robert James-Collier, Downton Abby) seem to have more
ambiguous feelings, it’s not exactly a cheery woodland jaunt even before they
find a gutted elk hanging from a tree and a bunch of BLAIR WITCH style hanging
totems.
For quite a long time,
that’s what the movie offers: an emotionally fraught journey with four grieving
men who aren’t in the habit of expressing themselves very openly, wandering
through a strange, nebulously threatening wilderness. But it gradually, almost imperceptibly,
migrates from drama to survival thriller to horror movie with a remarkable
steady seamlessness, mostly through a deft control of tone and a mercilessly
steady escalation of new and more explicit perils. This task is aided immeasurably
by the excellent atmospheric photography of cinematographer Andrew Shulkind (THE
VAULT), which does a phenomenal job of capturing exactly what’s so irresistibly
scary about the woods at night, and also, a few vitally important times, what’s
so comfortingly beautiful about nature during the day.
This is not a thing to
be overlooked; many horror movies are set in the woods, but very, very few ever
seem to have a good sense of how to shoot nature in a authentic way. Everything
that something like IT’S IN THE BLOOD misses about the experience of being alone in a forest is vividly present here, especially in the night scenes, where the
small circle of illuminated vertical tree trunks vanishing into an endless
black abyss manages to feel both claustrophobic and agoraphobic at the same time.
It ignites something very primal in the brain, a sense of being alone and
helpless and vulnerable, surrounded by inchoate malevolence lurking just beyond
perception. The effect is cumulative, and the longer the movie lingers, the more
it builds a powerful feeling of helpless isolation, a sense of ancient,
timeless horror hovering just on the outskirts of modernity. And the safety of
the familiar, predictable modern world is never excessively remote –the hikers,
of course, are only a few days’ trek from civilization!—but it is always hopelessly
out of reach. You get the feeling that just over a few hills, there are trendy
bars and shiny impersonal office buildings, but they might as well be a world
away. It adds a hint of cruel irony to the usual feelings of backwoods
helplessness; they’re so close to comforting society, but it helps them
not at all.
That’s important, because for most of the film, the vibe
is the real star. The actors are uniformly capable, but like
HEREDITARY --and, let’s be honest, a lot of these serious, slow-burn modern horror movies-- quite a bit of time is spent
on character drama which doesn’t really link up, narratively, to what ends up
happening. It’s a mildly interesting (if somewhat clichéd) detail that our protagonists
are dealing with the death of their friend and processing the guilt and blame
about Luke’s role in it, but for how much of the movie is devoted to this plot,
it doesn’t turn out to really be important at all. You could replace it with basically any standard horror movie backstory and the plot here wouldn't change in any meaningful way. The best of these modern, drama-savvy horror movies, like THE BABADOOK or THE CANAL,
bridge that gap, and make the character drama an intrinsic part of the movie’s
central conflict. Others, like THE INVITATION or HEREDITARY, spend a lot of time with character details which seem to run
parallel to their actual point. They’re not worthless, exactly, since they make
their characters richer and more interesting to watch, but they are extraneous,
which, to my mind, inevitably makes the whole weaker than it could be.
In the movie’s defense,
the standard flashbacks to a traumatic event are handled with slightly more
imagination than usual; rather than just flashing back to footage from the
opening, the haunted Luke sees his trauma physically manifest in the reality
around him. So every so often he’ll turn around and there will be a couple
shelves of liquor and a line of fluorescent lights sitting there in the middle
of the woods. It’s a pretty neat image, and I approve. The concept may not be even
remotely fresh (it’s about as standard as these things come… looking at you,
DARK WAS THE NIGHT), but at least the execution is. And the
movie deserves a little respect for showing a distinctly multicultural England;
a couple characters are not what you would think of when you imagine
“Anglo-saxon” Brits, and it goes entirely uncommented upon. It’s no cheap
morality lesson, just a clear-eyed view of the modern, diverse world. Bravo.
Still, for how much time gets wasted on the interpersonal drama, I’m not
convinced that any of it is very insightful or well-written. In fact, the
writing (by Joe Barton [iBOY] based on the novel by Adam Nevill) actually feels pretty clunky from time to
time, though the actors do a splendid job of selling it naturally.
But never mind that,
because the atmosphere is more than sufficient to run defense for the movie’s
dithering first act (at 94 minutes it's not egregiously lengthy, but would
certainly not suffer from a bit of tightening up in the first half), and well
before its sense of primal doom has lost its punch the movie shifts abruptly
into one of the best goddam creature features I’ve seen in years, and any
little missteps from before are immediately and wholly forgiven. The creature
itself is a magnificent design, utterly unique, instinctively captivating, and
thoroughly disquieting. There’s enough ungulate in there to comfortably
guarantee Larry Fessenden a hard-on,
but it’s not quite any one thing. Its appearance and nature are revealed
gradually, but by the end you get a good long look, and you’ve never seen
anything quite like it. It’s a bit of a hodge-podge, but it deftly and
decisively avoids the modern curse of overcomplicated, over-designed visual
gibberish, instead cutting a distinct and elegantly comprehensible figure
(heightened by the film’s clever decision to reveal it first in silhouette).
It’s this huge thing, but there’s like, something inside it, something
kind of human, that you can never quite make out. A god, I guess. A Son of
Loki, they say? Tom Hiddleston, you ol’ dog.
The monster is so great
that it almost doesn’t matter about anything else, but it’s a nice bonus that
the story works, too. Not that it’s some sweeping literary marvel or anything
--it’s cliché at best, and possibly just badly written-- but that doesn’t end
up mattering one iota, and in fact its sturdy simplicity helps give it a
mythic, timeless quality that suits the material splendidly. It’s the perfect
example of basic material executed beautifully; it’s certainly easy to imagine
a version of the exact same story which feels like the most imaginatively
barren slog possible,* but thanks to Bruckner’s impeccable direction, that’s
categorically not the case here. The story may be simple, but the telling squeezes it for all the tension
it’s worth, tightening the vice so subtly that you can’t quite put your finger
on the point where things shift from inconvenient to dire; things seem bad but
manageable, then worse but manageable, and then somehow everything goes to hell
without anyone quite realizing what has happened.
 |
| If you haven't seen the movie, I don't want to ruin it for you, so no picture of the critter in question. |
All this adds up to one
inescapable conclusion: THE RITUAL is a truly top-notch lost-in-the-scary-woods
journey with a real humdinger of a destination, and no amount of flabby
character development can take that away from it. Whatever reservations I have
about the way they want to take me there, I’m 100% on board for the ride. With its sturdy construction, wild climax, and iconic creature, I think this is a rare horror flick which might just earn a cult following over time...
...If only it had a name anyone would be able to
remember two weeks from now. Oh well, at least it’s guaranteed a long, venerable
existence of being called “you know, that one where there’s a Swedish guy who
lives in a moose’s head. I think it’s called THE RITE?”
* In fact, the
movie almost lost every bit of goodwill it had gained from me when I read that
they cut the part from the book where our heroes are tormented by the members
of a satanic black metal band called “Blood Frenzy.” What the fuck were you thinking, taking something like that out? That’s so
metal just reading it may have given me lead poisoning! You’re damn lucky I
liked your monster, fellas. Damn lucky.
* “[In gialli] The girls are always going on
some trip somewhere and they're all very smart. They all make decisions the
audience would make.” -- Eli Roth,
in one of the most preposterously indefensible statements ever made on a public
platform by anyone other than Donald Trump.
CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018
CHECKLIST!
Searching For Bloody
Pictures
TAGLINE
|
They Should Have Gone
To Vegas.
Oh well, save it for
the sequel?
|
TITLE ACCURACY
|
There is a ritual, but
wouldn’t HELLMOOSE been a little more descriptive?
|
LITERARY ADAPTATION?
|
Yes, actually, from
the 2011 novel by Adam Nevill (to be fair to the movie, the book is also
titled “The Ritual”)
|
SEQUEL?
|
None yet, but it just
came out last year (it had a festival release date in 2017, but premiered on
Netflix in 2018). I’d be down for more.
|
REMAKE?
|
No
|
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN
|
UK production, but
shot in Romania
|
HORROR SUB-GENRE
|
Creature feature, Evil
Cult, “Evil Town,”
|
SLUMMING A-LISTER?
|
None.
|
BELOVED HORROR ICON?
|
None
|
NUDITY?
|
None
|
SEXUAL ASSAULT?
|
None
|
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!
|
If you wanna count
this thing as an animal, sure.
|
GHOST/ ZOMBIE /
HAUNTED BUILDING?
|
None
|
POSSESSION?
|
No
|
CREEPY DOLLS?
|
None
|
EVIL CULT?
|
Yes
|
MADNESS?
|
No
|
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?
|
None
|
VOYEURISM?
|
None
|
MORAL OF THE STORY
|
If your friend is ever
bludgeoned to death in front of you, do not, I repeat, NOT give into the urge
to go sadness-hiking in a grim Scandinavian forest with your three most
emotionally repressed friends.
|
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