The Ritual

Some nights, you're not in the mood for Orson Welles or Abbas Kiarastomi.  In fact, sometimes even a well-crafted film noir from the forties or fifties has too many sharp edges to readily assimilate.  You're too tired for something with an intricate plot or complicated mise en scene.  Best, then, to watch a low budget Netflix-produced horror film -- in this case The Ritual (2017) directed by David Bruckner. The movie is okay for its modest aspirations and horror films, as a great anthropologist once said of animals, are "good to think with," allthough, of course, thought is not the objective here.  

Everything about The Ritual is predictable.  Five young men in a pub are discussing where they will vacation next year.  Someone suggests a hike along the "King's Trail" on the border between Norway and Sweden -- "it's like the Appalachian Trail except without the hillbillies" one of them says.  (I assume this is a reference to Deliverance.)  No decision is made.  A few moments later two of the young men go into a liquor store to buy a bottle of vodka.  Of course, the viewer can predict what will happen:  a robbery in underway.  One of the men is killed while the other man cowers behind the racks of bottles.

A year later, the four surviving friends are on the trail in northern Sweden.  One of them, Dom, sprains his knee when he falls into a hole.  (The other men mock him and say that he's shirking the hike, but, in fact, as the film progresses, it becomes clear that he has really injured himself -- his meniscus is torn.)  The hikers are about one day's walk from a lodge but, as one expects in this kind of film, they decide to take a shortcut through a forbidding dark forest.  This, of course, is a very bad decision.  A monster lives in the forest and also a cult of monster-worshipers.  In this sort of movie, you don't really bother to learn the names of the characters because it's pretty clear that they are going to be killed before the end of the film.  The trek through the forest becomes increasingly grim and, during a thunderstorm, the boys take refuge in a sort of timber block house used for the evil rites of the monster-worshippers.  There's a strange effigy in an upstairs room, a tree trunked hacked into the form of a headless torso with antlers for hands.  (This thing looks something like effigies of woodland gods that the Sami people of northern Scandinavia erected in holy places in the northern woods and tundra.  I saw several of these in the Swedish National Museum in Stockholm and they are, indeed, very scary-looking artifacts.)  To say that that the lads have a bad night in the blockhouse chapel in the woods would be an understatement -- one of the boys ends up naked praying to the eerie artifact; the others have horrible nightmares -- one pisses himself in fear.  The hero, as it turns out, keeps flashing back to the night in the liquor store when he failed to rescue his buddy.  Things go from bad to worse and the film ends with a confrontation with both the deadly creature and his worshippers.  (The monster is said to be "the bastard son of Loki" and some kind of Jotuenn -- that is, a Frost Giant.) 

Most horror films involve sexuality repressed and displaced in perverted ways.  This picture is an exception -- there's no sex involved at all and the monster, a very abstract creature, doesn't seem to represent female genitals or anything else on that order.  Instead, the film seems to be about fear.  The shadowy monster, not revealed until the last ten minutes, symbolizes anything that frightens you.  The hero keeps seeing the woods opening up into the brightly lit liquor store where he failed his friend.  The monster isn't particularly daunting -- it turns out he just wants to be loved.  As long as you bow down before the baleful beast, he will leave you alone.  Therefore, it seems reasonably clear that the monster symbolizes fear and that if you face your fears -- something that occurs very literally in this movie -- all will be well.  Ultimately, the hero stands up to the beast and, indeed, defiantly bellows in its face (or lack of a face) and this cows the creature.  The movie isn't overly gory and it even has a modestly inspiring theme.  The wan and cowardly monster-worshippers don't add much to the movie --they are pretty easily slaughtered by the hero.  

Most of the film involves men hiking around in woods, huffing and puffing.  There's lots of limping and groaning.  The creature is very well-designed and interesting to behold.  In some shots, the creature, a chimera comprised of a giraffe and a moose, looks like a bare tree or, even, the weird effigy in the blockhouse.  Most of the movie is shot at night.  But this is a problem.  You can't hike in northern Sweden except in midsummer.  And in midsummer, there's no night -- even in Stockholm, it's bright at 10:30 and the sun rises at 3:00 am.  Farther north there is simply no night at all.  (In fact, the movie was shot in some National Park in Romania -- it's an impressive landscape but nothing like northern Sweden.)   A little Internet research verifies this observation -- the Kungsleden (King's Trail) is so far north that much of the trail system lies within the Arctic Circle -- so there would be no real night here.