The Ritual is bad. It’s not bad in an interesting way that suggests it was ever on to something good in the first place, or like it was a production that somehow lost its way or went off the rails. It’s bad in a shallow, callous way; a cash-grab that will cheerlessly take the money and time of anyone who might be in the mood for yet another religious horror. Backpacking on the likes of good movies (Immaculate, The First Omen), mediocre movies (The Exorcism), and straight up unwatchable disasters (The Exorcist: Believer) from the past several years, The Ritual (which also shouldn’t be confused with the much better 2017 British horror film of the same name) manages to be the lowest of the low in this genre; a staggering miasma of shit that drags a wholly overqualified cast down into the abyss with it.
You know a movie is in severe trouble when the text used for the opening crawl – the only context that will be provided for anything in the film to follow – is an eye straining, virtually illegible chore to read. It says that the film is based on the most widely documented case of an exorcism in the history of the Catholic church, told from the perspective and notes of assisting priest Father Joseph Steiger (played by Dan Stevens). He’s a priest at a small town parish in Earling, Iowa in the year 1928, but the budget is so low and production design so lazy that it could be mistaken for any year sixty years in either direction. He’s told that a troubled young woman (Abigail Cowen) is being brought to his parish (for… reasons?) so a more seasoned priest, Father Theophilus Reisinger (Al Pacino) can perform a Solemn Sacrament. Still believing that there has to be a psychological or physical reason for the woman’s troubles, Father Steiger wants to postpone things until a doctor can look at her. Papa Theo says “no can do” and goes ahead with things because he’s right: this girl needs an exorcism because there wouldn’t be a movie without one.
Director David Midell and co-writer Enrico Natale have crafted a film that is the definition of going through the motions. Forget about setting up any characters beyond the past failures of Father Reisinger and mentioning repeatedly that Father Steiger just lost his brother. The Ritual just dives headlong into the cliched exorcism stuff without giving much of a toss whether or not the audience is invested in any of this. It’s a limp, style free assembly of scenes so stringently copied and pasted from better movies that it’s a case where one wonders if flawed and artistically detestable AI couldn’t have made a more interesting bad movie than this. The Ritual is a film that callously knows what things have worked better in other movies – vomit spewing, demons that know people’s darkest secrets, levitation, crosses burning imprints in foreheads, bones popping and cracking, intense chanting of incantations, outbursts of swearing from such a perfectly nice young woman – and employs them with all the oomph and zeal of a years old tax return. There is nothing – zip, zilch, nada – that sets The Ritual apart.
The visual aesthetic of The Ritual is “who gives a shit” chic, and Midell makes the baffling decision to shoot the entire film using handheld cinematography. That might be in a bid to make the true events The Ritual is based on look like a documentary of sorts, but that only succeeds in making it look like the entire church is on a floating garbage barge amid a raging sea. There’s no humour at all to such a dour affair, and just even the slightest knowing nod to the fact that this entire enterprise is bereft of creativity might’ve given it some respect. The Ritual also has an ungodly slow pace, with the story unfolding over the course of several days, meaning the action always starts and stops. It never gets good, but the pacing makes things even more of a slog.
I don’t feel bad for Pacino, who dons a ridiculous getup, mumbles most of his lines with an accent that’s more Jewish than Catholic, and an energy level that’s hovering around 1% investment. Despite still doing good work in some recent films, he’s never below taking a payday as of late, and dunking on him at this point is useless. I do feel sorry for Stevens and Cowen, however, as they’re easily the only people saving this from being an all time loser. Cowen brings the right amount of physicality to the possessed Emma Schmidt, and Stevens is trying so hard to give a good performance that I was often afraid he might pop a blood vessel from the strain of it all. Both of them are too good for this, and come to think of it, even on his worst day, Pacino is, too.
When The Ritual wrapped up, I got my only real chuckle from its credits, which lists it as a Buzzfeed Studios production. How fitting that a company like Buzzfeed – which has been marketing this film relentlessly for weeks now on social media – should continue their endeavours into film production with something that feels like the horror movie equivalent of skimming a shoddily assembled list of regurgitated facts people already knew but clicked on anyway. But those lists pass in a matter of seconds into a brain rot ether before being forgotten. The Ritual lasts a full ninety minutes of someone’s life that they’ll never get back. They aren’t watching it on a train between stops or while waiting for something better to happen. They have to physically leave the house, pay money, and sit in a dark room with other hapless souls who made the same mistake. That’s scarier to think about than anything that happens on screen in The Ritual, a time waster that literally kills the viewer’s precious moments on Earth.
The Ritual opens in theatres everywhere on Friday, June 6 2025.
