The Ritual (2017)
Directed by David Bruckner
A group of university friends reunite for a hiking trip in Sweden, but are stalked by a menacing presence when they're diverted through the woods.
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What critics say influenced The Ritual
Though the plot recalls The Blair Witch Project, the film it most resembles stylistically is the superb The Descent.
There’s more than one way to die in the woods, although so far as horror-film narratives in that vein go, “The Blair Witch Project” has cast a bit too pervasive a shadow for nearly two decades now.
However, this control of style isn't enough to shake off The Blair Witch Project's shadow, especially during an intense tent-based episode, and the resolution serves to demonstrate how successfully the first Blair film channelled the chill of the unseen.
There are echoes of The Blair Witch Project without the found footage tropes and the use of symbols of folk ritual of an alien culture make the audience squirm a bit with discomfort.
And The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999), especially once the friends encounter a strange symbol carved on a tree.
This feels like a subtle knock at The Blair Witch Project , the genre precursor that this film most resembles, and which was set in a strip of Maryland forest through which the Appalachian trail passes.
Utilizing the incredible landscape for some truly beautiful images, Bruckner’s film (based on novel of the same name) mixes elements of things we’ve seen before, executed maturely, confidently, and most importantly—effectively, as vibes reminiscent of (but not riffing on) The Blair Witch Project & The Descent covered in a rural folk-horror blanket of The Witch & The Wicker Man, all framed with a theme of guilt.
With the tragedy in the guys’ recent past, The Ritual recalls yet another horror movie, Neil Marshall’s indispensable The Descent .
Though the plot recalls The Blair Witch Project, the film it most resembles stylistically is the superb The Descent.
However, David Bruckner’s film leans most heavily on The Descent.
Based on Adam Nevill's 2011 novel of the same name, David Bruckner's feature debut (produced by Kiwi favourite Andy Serkis) The Ritual (streaming on Netflix from February 9) offers a smorgasbord of Swedish-set horrors, which, while nothing especially new (the set-up is essentially The Blair Witch Project by way of Trollhunter, The World's End, The Wicker Man and The Descent), is elevated by screenwriter Joe Barton's (TV's Humans) sharp writing and some nifty editing and camerawork.
“The Ritual” is what happens if you put “The Descent,” “The Witch” and “Blair Witch” in a blender, and I mean that as a good thing.
The film blends the geezer-humour of Dog Soldiers with the backwoods superstitions of The Wicker Man and chucks in a monstrous quadruped tree demon with a taste for human entrails.
That’s all the more disappointing given that Bruckner is clearly inspired by one of the all-time great movies about masculinity, John Boorman’s Deliverance .
At first I thought— Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), obviously.
Director David Bruckner’s survival horror-thriller “The Ritual,” written by Joe Barton and adapted from the novel by Adam Nevill, is “Deliverance” meets “The Blair Witch Project,” the tale of modern men confronting primeval, primitive terrors.
It’s like a supernatural version of Deliverance, in which four unsuspecting city boys get in over their heads with the barbarous natives but are threatened with impalement on tree branches instead of sodomization by hillbillies.
A nivel general el film nos propone una serie de combinaciones algo bizarras para cada fase de la narración, así tenemos una primera parte símil aventuras angustiosas en sintonía con Deliverance (1972) y El Proyecto Blair Witch ( The Blair Witch Project , 1999), un segundo capítulo que apuesta al acecho y las peleas cíclicas de trabajos como Diabólico ( The Evil Dead , 1981) y El Descenso ( The Descent , 2005) y finalmente un último acto en el que se da cita el lúgubre ritual del título, el cual le debe mucho a El Culto Siniestro ( The Wicker Man , 1973) y La Bruja ( The Witch: A New-England Folktale , 2015).
Korine has seen an awful lot of Jean-Luc Godard’s ’60s movies (I don’t think you can see too many), and his borrowed Pop Art devices — repetitive voice-overs, gunshots and barrel clicks as aural counterpoint, mechanistic nods to 1983’s “Scarface’’ — turn wearyingly familiar before the end.
Sporting elaborate cornrows, and front teeth studded with more grillwork than a ’58 Plymouth, Franco is a man in love with his stuff: his gun-bedecked walls, his bed “that’s an art-piece,” his constantly running loop of the 1983 Florida crime classic Scarface.
At his crib, where bongs and blow are plentiful and Al Pacino's Scarface plays on a continuous loop, the coeds live the dream.
In Florida, the girls encounter the personification of their idea of black culture, a celebrity spring break mascot, self-described "straight hustler" and white "gangsta" rapper named Alien (James Franco), a devil figure with a platinum grill, braided hair and Brian De Palma's "Scarface" on repeat in his crib.
A key scene where he proudly shows off his collection of guns - Brian De Palma's Scarface playing on a continuous background loop in his living room - is one of the few times when you sense Spring Breakers may really be about something.
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I was also, though, strongly reminded of Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957; aka Curse of the Demon ).
While the central horror is fully revealed, there are some great shots of the trees waving and rustling while everyone waits in anticipation and fear—just as in the classic Night of the Demon (and also in Tourneur’s other classic horror film, 1942’s Cat People ).
The touchstones of The Ritual point toward the direction of the story: Hints of “The Hills Have Eyes” (1977) and, more recently, “Bone Tomahawk” — although Bruckner’s film lacks the nightmarish rawness of the former and the cinematic poise and poetic brutality of the latter.
A nivel general el film nos propone una serie de combinaciones algo bizarras para cada fase de la narración, así tenemos una primera parte símil aventuras angustiosas en sintonía con Deliverance (1972) y El Proyecto Blair Witch ( The Blair Witch Project , 1999), un segundo capítulo que apuesta al acecho y las peleas cíclicas de trabajos como Diabólico ( The Evil Dead , 1981) y El Descenso ( The Descent , 2005) y finalmente un último acto en el que se da cita el lúgubre ritual del título, el cual le debe mucho a El Culto Siniestro ( The Wicker Man , 1973) y La Bruja ( The Witch: A New-England Folktale , 2015).
There are also parallels with Christopher Smith’s very fine medieval thriller, “Black Death,” in the way that the film takes an arresting shift in the final act.
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One of the most welcome developments in contemporary genre cinema has been the creeping revival of the folk horror, with Ben Wheatley’s Kill List and A Field in England, David Keating’s Wake Wood, and Tom Shankland’s The Children tapping into the old ley lines.
Definitely we’re in the territory now of The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015) and Kill List (Ben Wheatley 2011).
One of the most welcome developments in contemporary genre cinema has been the creeping revival of the folk horror, with Ben Wheatley’s Kill List and A Field in England, David Keating’s Wake Wood, and Tom Shankland’s The Children tapping into the old ley lines.
Indeed, the first sign of something more than trees in the forest is an old junked van—one of the first signs that something is wrong in Texas Chain Saw Massacre and, still more insistently, in the more derivative backwoods horror, Wrong Turn (Rob Schmidt, 2003).