Lost in the Woods
The Ritual is a British horror movie newly arrived on Netflix – it’s a cut above the usual (not a high water mark), but still largely forgettable.
The story begins with a group of college chums bumping up against the mid 30s and the necessity of getting home after just one pint, it being a work night and all. In protest at age and prudence, Luke (Rafe Spall) boldly ventures into a supermarket for a bottle of vodka, bringing Robert (Paul Reid) along with him. Unwittingly, they have wandered into a robbery. Luke cowers in a corner, watching the thieves bash Robert’s head in with a bat.
He awakens six months later in the Swedish mountains (the location scout did a nice job). The group has come on vacation here in honor of their dead friend. They climb a mountain, pass around a flask, pour some liquor on the ground, and then take a shortcut through the forest to a nearby hostel. Bad idea.
They further compound their error when they find a cabin in the woods and decide to wait out the night there. The screams that follow are exactly what you’d expect from a movie called The Ritual. To clarify, this is “lost in the woods” horror, not really “cabin in the woods” horror. The movie works like a woodland chamber play and the fear is generally psychological – dealing with anxieties of separation and disorientation. Eventually, of course, someone winds up in a tree with vital pieces of his digestive system missing, but the monster or force that put him there, now stalking the group, is of dimensions and motivations unknown.
To use terms from Scream, the “rules” are never quite clear, which makes the movie hard to enjoy. The audience is just as lost as the characters.
Where The Ritual does stand out from the pack is in the acting. For a low budget horror movie, it’s surprisingly good, and we had high hopes that Hutch (Robert James-Collier), the rugged one of the group, might turn out to be a kind of Burt Reynolds from Deliverance. Sadly, the paper-thin plot offered no such twists, equalizing the men into monster fodder.
Suspense requires that we at least feel that our characters have a fighting chance; the men of The Ritual were goners from the title screen.
...seen on Netflix