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[notthelatin]

This is the House We Get Murdered In: The Ritual (2017)

The first time I saw David Bruckner’s 2017 monster movie The Ritual I liked it a lot. The second time I watched it I fell head-over-heels so hard that I decided to just start a blog so I’d have somewhere to deliver this dang sermon. If you’re on the fence, and you like monsters, or creepy forests, or just really good character writing, go watch it. If you still need some convincing, read on.

There’s a thing that happens in horror sometimes, where the building of tension supersedes the building of character. I get it, I do, they’re trying to scare us, and sometimes they get so focused on threatening the people on the screen that they forget to make us care about the people on the screen. Horror that emphasizes thrills over depth can be fun, can even strike terror if it’s good enough, but it’s harder to inspire real horror when your audience isn’t sure why they should care in the first place. Sometimes, in acknowledgment of this, a movie shoehorns in a little monologue just before the climax, in the hopes that it will inspire us to suddenly love this person enough to care when their face is bitten off in the next scene. The Ritual is a movie that seeks not just to avoid that particular narrative sin, but to avenge the audiences that have fallen victim to it. And holy shit, do I feel avenged.

Never mind that the setting is gorgeous, that the sound design is stellar, that the dream sequences are my favorite of any movie I’ve ever seen. I could tell you that the performances are all believable and touching, and that the monster design is the most unique I’ve seen in years.

But what I NEED to tell you about is the writing. 

This movie spends its entirety rendering a careful, thoughtful portrait of its four main characters. Four men in the early half of middle age, Hutch, Phil, Dom, and Luke, on a multi-day hike through Scandinavia. It’s a trip their friend Rob wanted to take before he died. They’re here to memorialize him.

Every interaction and every scrap of dialogue between these four is beautifully intentional. Every joke or offhand comment is there to tell you about one of these men, or about their history together, and none of it feels extraneous. When they find a spooky cabin in the woods, one quips “This is clearly the house we get murdered in”. His friend shoots back: “not as bad as our uni accommodations”. 

This is the only mention of their time in university. A movie that trusted its audience less might treat us to a flashback of their freshman hall, or a stiffly recounted anecdote about how they all met. The Ritual knows that we don’t need anything more. We know that these men, who are at the stage of life where they’re moving from benders to brunches, have been friends since college, since they were barely more than kids. It’s a world of history rendered in a single joke line, and it feels natural, it feels genuine. Every decision in this movie is made with the same care- from the jokes they make at one another’s expense, to the way they react to the growing tension of knowing they aren’t alone in the woods, to the ways they comfort themselves and one another when things start to go wrong.

There’s a scene where they’re marching, hungry, though the woods, daydreaming about the meals they want when they reach safety. Amidst conversations about steak and red wine, Dom announces that what he REALLY wants is a “McDonalds burger, on a metal tray, eaten alone”. It’s played for laughs, but it also tells us exactly what kind of man Dom is in one line.This is a man who chooses quick, emotionally satisfying, nutritionally empty solutions to his problems, and doesn’t care if it isolates him. Later, when he decides, in a fit of frustration, to march away down a random path that’s heading in a different direction than the one they need to go, completely alone, we BELIEVE him. This is not a random panic decision, or a stupid unrealistic plot choice made by writers who wanted to get their characters lost at any cost. That path is a McDonalds burger, and he’s happy to eat it by himself. Similarly, blame is the cheap, easy solution that Dom turns to in his grief. Dom is angry and in pain over the loss of his friend Rob, and blaming someone is the easiest way to make the pain more bearable, even if it means pushing a living friend away. It’s quick, it’s easy, it feels good. It doesn’t bring Rob back.

The visuals in this movie are striking in a way that something so sparse shouldn’t be able to pull off. The colors are desaturated, the lighting is a uniform diffuse, overcast gray. And yet, when weird shit happens, that pared down approach lends itself to a certain shocked surreality. The signature quick-cuts and zooms we find sometimes in monster movies aren’t here in the Swedish forest. When there’s something terrible to see, we just see it, full screen, steady cam, quiet. It’s worse that way, somehow. Like the characters, we can look away, but that doesn’t mean the terrible thing is gone, and the daylight doesn’t soften anything.

The only missteps I found in this movie are towards its climax. The terror has been ramping up in such a satisfying way, and we’ve spent so much time in the quiet, measured, tense isolation of the forest, that when the setting changes to something man-made it feels almost mundane. We’re not sure whether to be terrified or sort of relieved. In the midst of some excellent character development, a nameless Swedish hillbilly wanders in seemingly just to mutter exposition? This is how the movie decides to tell us just what’s been stalking the woods all this time. The scene is brief, but in a movie that’s so careful, almost miserly, with the information it gives us, even that feels like a clumsy info dump. The character motivation for divulging this information isn’t very clear, and honestly, the writer’s motivation isn’t either. It seems like, for just a minute, the director stopped trusting us. “We can’t let an audience draw ALL the conclusions, can we? I’ll just spell this one out”.

Ultimately, that brief stumble before the (excellent) climactic scene doesn’t really detract from the movie. The Ritual is a smart, thoughtful, careful character portrait, and a touching exploration of grief, guilt, and the ways that we find to forgive ourselves and each other. It’s about standing up, sticking together, and moving forward. 

Also, the monster kicks every ass. 10/10

[notthelatin]

Hello

I don’t know how to do this.

I’m used to consuming content online, not producing it. I’m still a little shaky being on this side of the blog post. I don’t have any credentials to list, or bona fides to establish. I just love horror movies, and I wanted a place to talk about them. Feel free to reach out if you have a suggestion for the blog, or a question, or if you just want to chat! Ok, I love you, bye.