The Ritual

After a tragic event leaves one of their friends dead, the remaining four decide to honour him with a hike through Sweden. While on the hike, one of them injures his knee and the group decide to cut through the woods to make up the time and get him to a doctor. Big mistake...

The Ritual does a really good job of building tension in an unsettling environment. Woods are scary at night, super duper scary. The woods scared people in The Blair Witch Project and director David Bruckner takes a page out of that film's scare book. The Ritual's scariest moments are when all you can see are is the beam of light from a flashlight, scanning the woods for whatever the hell just made that sound. There has to be something in the woods, right? Some person, or worse...some thing.

Luke is plagued by nightmares about the night his friend died. He was there and he could have or should have done something. Maybe some of his friends blame him, maybe those nightmares manifest to an insane degree while hiking through these woods. Is something manipulating his mind to relive this terror? The Ritual doesn't give a clear answer on that, but it sure seems like it. One night, each of them experience some form of terror. Luke wakes up in the middle of the woods, bleeding from his chest after his nightmare. Hutch wakes up pissing himself, Dom is crying in the corner and Phil is naked praying to some weird homemade deity in the attic of a rundown cabin. Things only get weirder from there.

I was taken back by some of the beautiful shots in this film. There are shots of the wilderness that could be paintings. Really majestic scenery. The woods themselves act as a character, suffocating these hikers, unwilling to let them go. Who knows what lurks in the distance, but whatever it is, it's evil.



The Ritual is an excellent horror film in my books, blending in the camping nightmare with manifested depression and . I'm surprised to see the lack of enthusiasm for it. I never read the book, so I can't compare, but I dug the film.