The Ritual: The Horror of Grief
I was pretty tough on David Bruckner’s Hellraiser film in yesterday’s Spooktacular post and I’ll probably continue to be for some time. Hopefully, it’s just a blip in my budding appreciation for the director. I am a fan of his 2021 film The Night House and I have fond memories of his section of 2007’s The Signal. By most accounts, he has also contributed some strong shorts to a couple horror compilations that I look forward to checking out. However, for my money, his best outing so far is easily 2017’s The Ritual. After years of putting it off, I finally decided to press play on this one a few weeks ago and it blew me away.
The film begins with a group of friends planning their next excursion. Before the evening is over, one of them is murdered during a liquor store robbery, while another survives by hiding instead of intervening. The film then jumps ahead six months to the group hiking in the wilderness of Sweden (the trip their murdered friend had proposed on the night he died). It’s clear they are still raw and processing their friend’s death, especially the man who witnessed it, Luke (Rafe Spall). Things begin to go awry when one of the hikers injures his knee and the friends decide the best way through the wilderness is a straight line — a short cut through the old forest.
My friend and fellow film enthusiast Jason Callen wrote his own reaction to The Ritual recently and I don’t think there’s much of a point in trying to improve upon what he’s already written so well. So, I’ll be quoting him extensively here:
This middle portion of the film is the strongest, most atmospheric, and with a Herzogian understanding that nature is not a thing to marvel at, but a thing to fear, where danger lurks everywhere, indifferent to your reverence of its beauty. Bruckner highlights this danger by eliminating all sounds from the forest; no birds tweet, no bugs chirp, no animals rustle the underbrush. You don’t realize how unnerving it is until the group comes across what looks to have been a deer, eviscerated and stuck unnaturally in a tree 30 feet above the ground.
Do you ever get caught up rooting for a film? It’s probably not the “best” or most immersive way to watch stuff, but I couldn’t help it with The Ritual. From the very start, everything about it was sitting juuuust right with me — so much so that I started crossing my fingers that it could keep that up. Contrary to my curmudeonly attitude, I want to love almost every film I sit down to watch for the first time. Most often, that’s just not the case though.
I agree with Jason that the middle portion is the strongest. It was here that I expected some cracks to show. I fully expected the group of friends to splinter into horror movie cliches and to start making stupid, horror movie decisions. You can argue they already did that by taking the short cut, but it seems like a pretty logical course of action to me. And their decisions continue to be relatively sound for the situation they’re in. They’re not punished for stupidity, something that can sometimes take me out of a viewing experience because I could never imagine myself being so stupid. Instead, their suffering is made much more horrific by the fact that it’s inevitable.
At one point, a storm forces the friends to take refuge in a rundown cabin. It is there that they all experience terrible nightmares. Luke’s brings us back to the heavy role of grief in the film. I’ll throw to Jason again here:
All four men have disturbed dreams that night but Bruckner only visualizes Luke’s. Not surprisingly it involves witnessing his friend’s murder. Here THE RITUAL separates itself from other griefsplotation films; where most use grief simply as an means to an end to get to whatever other genre they’re mashing with, this continues to explore and confront the nature of grief, its long term effects on both ourselves and those around us. In essence, grief is a destructive power, altering our perception of ourselves and what we thought we knew. Even as it becomes clear within the narrative that there is indeed something big, scary, and dangerous in those woods, it is always Luke’s memory that holds the greatest horror. The film never loses sight of this.
In the final act of the film, the surviving characters end up dealing with backwoods cultists, who want to sacrifice them to the monster who already terrorized their group during their travels through the forest. I was prepared for this part to let me down and ruin the perfect streak The Ritual was on, but here, again, the film exceeds expectations by avoiding cliches and knocking the monster reveal out of the park.
It is here that Luke is given a choice, avert his gaze and succumb to the monster or face it and move forward. I’ll let Jason take it home:
The final confrontation with the jötunn seems anticlimactic by monster movie standards but as a continued metaphor for grief, it works quite well. Luke, unable to kill but able to wound the beast leaves it at the edge of its domain (the forest) where it roars futilely. Luke looks and roars back, but his screams aren’t futile, they’re cleansing. Grief cannot be destroyed. Once it is born it is there. It will change you, it may even shape you, but it doesn’t have to own you. Its destructive power doesn’t have to be total. You can live with it and prevail. You can roar back.
Is it scary? Yes. Seeing evidence of what the monster can do early on, mixed with persistent signs of dark magic, make for a spooky experience. The violent scene that kicks off the film (and is repeated throughout) is also pretty disturbing in its own right — not just for its brutality, but for the paralysis and helplessness we experience along with Luke.
Streaming: this is a Netflix release, so watch it there!
