The Ritual (2017)

The Ritual does a refreshing job of blending the line between supernatural and natural and delivers a a low-stakes, magical-realist romp. The God-Moose seems to be intended as a natural, evolved animal, impalin’ non-believers on natural objects, like a butcher bird would. The effects of hallucination and wish fulfillment don’t seem strictly forbidden by biology, given that their effect is occurring in the human mind only. Saint Bullwinkle’s evident barely-sub-human intelligence combined with its overwhelming psychic powers is a fresh and scary notion. There’s an interesting and believable biological dynamic between the worshipers and the God-Moose, in a setting that feels ancient and evolved, an undisturbed backwater of social/animal co-evolution. The monster/sorcery half of the premise was very cool, and was pretty well-executed up until the final, jerky, spatially-unreasonable denouncement in the woods with the monster (post-gunshot). This editing issue suggests that this ancient knoll of semi-parasitism/mutualism was tucked away in a valley just a 3-minute gallop from a modern highway…

The characters were extremely flat, but pretty well revealed. The main tension among the characters (that the main-guy survived the convenience-store robbery which killed their mutual friend, without a scratch) did not believably drive a wedge between the men and that whole parallel story felt quite contrived. I usually find it annoying when the Monster in a movie is a metaphor for some non-monster bullshit, although the wish-fulfilment powers of St. Winkle make his metaphorical effectiveness diegetic, at least. It’s always disappointing when horror movies allow the main characters to make obviously dumb or hasty decisions that are not in keeping with the character – it significantly decreases the maximum achievable scary for the whole movie – it makes the characters less relatable and pulls you out of the movie. That said, this was really quite scary up until the second death, at which point it had more or less fallen into a familiar format (although there was a lot of intriguing content through the end). The camera work was slick and effective, this used all of the framing, timing and fake-out horror tropes in a well-knit and polished way while avoiding most jump scares. The shadows in dense pine trees at night were scary even without a monster.

I noticed some anti-marriage thematic undercurrents (monster uses guy’s wife as object of mesmerization, and the instigating action (robbery) turns deadly because of a refusal to remove a wedding ring… Yet another preventable injury caused by wearing a ring!) I loved that eternal life for these undead worshipers is sittin’ an’ rottin’, screamin’ an’ moanin’ at 20 decibels on pews in a loft – a fine take on both heaven and religious study groups. I also got a kick out of how specifically tailored this is to a British audience: Four (then three) Caucasian men, one Indian man, on holiday in mainland Europe, get fucked over by three things which Britain has effectively lacked and feared for centuries or even millennia: Forests, Religion and Elk.