“We had those nightmares and it followed us, didn’t it?”
Grief is fertile ground for horror films. There’s something elemental about it, something intimately apocalyptic: the bone-deep knowledge that something in your life is gone, erased, and someday it will happen to you. Modern classic movies like The Babadook, Hereditary, The Descent, and Midsommar have plumbed these depths. Add to that list David Bruckner’s The Ritual, a surreal, insidious, gorgeous film that grabs you by the throat.
The Ritual wastes no time in getting horrifying. We meet five friends (Luke, Hutch, Dom, Phil, and Robert) at a pub, discussing where they’ll go for their next trip. Only four of them will make the journey. Luke and Robert enter a convenience store and walk right into a robbery in progress. Luke cowers behind an aisle while Robert is mugged and killed. Rafe Spall does some fine facial acting as Luke, allowing us to see the fear, rage, and helplessness beneath the inaction that will eat him alive.
Six months later, the four surviving friends are on the King’s Trail, on the border between Sweden and Norway. It was Robert’s idea, and the group eschews other plans like Las Vegas or Ibiza so they can go hiking in his honor. The scenery here is both gorgeous and terrifying, the immensity of the Nordic hillside both inviting and unforgiving. The score, by Ben Lovett, is sparse and atmospheric, and at times it recalls Stanley Kubrick’s use of Bela Bartok’s music in The Shining. Things are a bit tense among the group; Luke feels as though everyone blames him for Robert’s death, and although the trip is a nice gesture, none of them are too thrilled with the idea of hiking.
The performances are all great: solid, understated work from four actors, none of whom are trying to upstage anyone. There are some nice, light touches in the script by Joe Barton; when Dom and Hutch make mention of their children, it reminds us that these characters have interiority and lives that are led offscreen. This is a horror film, so a number of deaths are to be expected, and these little details make it tragic instead of shocking. There’s an undercurrent of mourning to The Ritual that gives it more heart than your average lost-in-the-woods horror film.
Don’t be mistaken, though: this is a lost-in-the-woods horror film, and a damn good one. Dom hurts his leg, and the group is forced to take a shortcut through the woods. They move slowly, which adds to the claustrophobic feel of the forest. The trees are as close as bars on a prison cell, and the thin branches splay out like open arms. It doesn’t seem like they’re taking a shortcut; it feels like an escape, and with Dom’s limp, there’s a chance that the forest will just swallow them whole.
The Ritual has some of the best imagery in any horror film in recent memory. When they first enter the forest, the group encounters an elk, strung up in a tree and eviscerated. Taking shelter in an abandoned cabin, the group finds runes hanging like ornaments, and, most horrifying, a totem in the attic, a sculpture of a being with no head and antlers for hands. This is one of The Ritual‘s images that just refuses to leave your brain. What’s maybe most effective, though, are Luke’s repeated hallucinations. He relives Robert’s death, again and again, in a convenience store with flickering lights and a floor of dirt and grass. The Ritual stands out from other films of its type by its willingness to be extremely strange. By the time Luke and Dom are taken captive by a camp of cultists living in the woods, it seems like the natural progression of events.
It’s here that we finally get a good look at the impossibly tall, improbably quiet beast that has been stalking the group. The monster in The Ritual is a thing of beauty, one of, in my opinion, the best monster designs in the history of the genre. It’s almost impossible to describe, even after having seen the movie twice. But as difficult as it is to describe, it is equally as difficult to forget. It was designed by Keith Thompson, a frequent collaborator of Guillermo del Toro’s, and while it wouldn’t look out of place in one of del Toro’s films, it absolutely belongs to this one.
More than the design, though, the monster sticks out because of what it, and the forest itself, represents: Luke’s grief. Luke grapples with the monster until he is forced into a supplicant position. But he refuses to bow, refuses to let this thing control him anymore. This is a movie that is light on sentimentality, but it’s nevertheless moving to see Luke escape from the woods, escape from the guilt and the grief that has consumed him for six months, escape into his new life.
10/1: Hellraiser / The Invitation
10/2: Splice / Banshee Chapter
10/3: Jennifer’s Body / Raw
10/4: Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist / Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
10/5: Kill List / A Field in England
10/6: Halloween II / Halloween III: Season of the Witch
10/7: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge / A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
10/8: Ginger Snaps / Creep
10/9: Cube / Creep 2
10/10: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) / The Ritual
10/11: Hell House LLC / The Taking of Deborah Logan
10/12: Re-Animator / From Beyond
10/13: Beetlejuice / Sleepy Hollow
10/14: Idle Hands / The Lords of Salem
10/15: The Ring / Noroi: The Curse
10/16: I Know What You Did Last Summer / The Monster
10/17: Night of the Living Dead / Train to Busan
10/18: The Devil’s Backbone / Southbound
10/19: Event Horizon / Dreamcatcher
10/20: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari / The Bad Seed
10/21: Eyes Without a Face / Goodnight Mommy
10/22: The Strangers / The Strangers: Prey at Night
10/23: In the Mouth of Madness / The Void
10/24: The Amityville Horror / Honeymoon
10/25: Gerald’s Game / Emelie
10/26: The Monster Squad / Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
10/27: Veronica / Jacob’s Ladder
10/28: High Tension / You’re Next
10/29: The Innkeepers / Bug
10/30: The People Under the Stairs / Vampires
10/31: Saw / Saw II
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