The Ritual (2018)

directed by David Bruckner
UK
94 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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I had just finished the book a couple of hours prior to watching this, and I thought it would be best to see the movie as soon as possible, because the book is the sort of thing that keeps you in a specific mental state for a while after you read it. I can't say the movie has the same effect, because reading a book obviously takes longer than watching a movie, but I think the film does do the book justice, for the most part.

The Ritual is a good, solid, refreshing horror movie, and even if you separate it completely from its source material it can stand on its own. We've all seen movies about strange things happening in the woods, but The Ritual handles it in a way that imparts explicitly upon the viewer how old, how unlike anything else on Earth, this particular forest and what it contains is. The film is prone to big gestures, to going with things that almost seem too dramatic but work anyway. Thankfully, the full reveal of the thing in the forest is kept tantalizingly away from viewers until the right moment, but beginning to end, this movie deftly juggles subtlety and absolute terror.

I was very curious to see how they would adapt the second half of the book because even while I was reading it, it took me a while to get adjusted to the tonal shift between the first half (in the forest) and the second half (in the house). They did change a whole lot about this second half in the movie, and I actually feel like this is where it makes its biggest mistake- instead of having the four specific characters that the book has, the movie puts in a gaggle of essentially anonymous cultist types, and I think involving that many people ruined the sense of isolation a bit.

The book was really about it, Moder, the forest God, whatever you want to call the thing in the forest, even when it didn't seem like it. Even in that second half when our attention is briefly shifted to Luke's attempts to escape from some people with bad intentions for him, it commands everything behind the scenes. Unexpectedly, this absence of the explicit presence of it renders it into an even more powerful force, because the book manages to impress upon us that it's always there somehow, and its presence dwarfs Luke's struggles. I didn't get this in the movie, nor did I see the full mythology- the people in the attic, for example, are shown in one very good and true-to-source scene, but they're not explained adequately, and are turned into an isolated disturbing image rather than an important facet of an ancient belief system. All of these are flaws that only present themselves if you've read the book, however.

This is genuinely a scary movie, and like I said, it feels really inventive and fresh despite its basis in the "friends on holiday encounter horrors" trope. This is the first time in as long as I can remember that jumpscares have actually managed to surprise me. All the acting is also perfect and visually it's a treat. Basically: please read the book because it's fantastic, but please also see the movie because it is also great but in different ways.