‘The Ritual’ on Netflix Is Classic Cabin-in-the-Woods Horror

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What to Stream This Weekend

Movie: The Ritual
Director: David Bruckner
Starring: Rafe Spall, Robert James-Collier, Sam Troughton, Arsher Ali
Available on: Netflix

One of my favorite setups for horror movies is when something terrible will happen in the “real world” in the first ten minutes of a film. Usually an untimely death, sometimes a traumatic breakup, or some other kind of unsettling incident that sets the main characters off into a state of trauma. They then retreat to some remote location to recuperate, only to find something even more horrifying there, and they have to fight through it or die. This has been the set-up for innumerable horror classics, from The Descent to Don’t Look Now to Dead Calm to The Howling, and it’s done in classic, high-suspense fashion in David Bruckner’s effective new horror film The Ritual.

Here’s the setup: five friends from Britain plan their annual guys’ trip, with a trek through the hills in Sweden beating out more hedonistic ventures to Vegas or Ibiza. Before it comes time to travel, however, two of the five get caught in a liquor-store robbery, and while Luke (Rafe Spall) cowers behind some shelves, Rob (Paul Reid) is murdered. Some weeks later, the four surviving friends take their hiking trip, setting up a stone memorial to their fallen pal at the top of a mountain. Luke, however, is wracked with guilt, and his friends can’t really look at him the same way, knowing what he didn’t do to save Rob. When Dom (Sam Troughton) falls and injures his leg, the group decides to take a shortcut through the forest to get back quicker. You can imagine what a terrible idea that is. It gets dark, it starts to rain, they find an abandoned cabin in the woods, and inside, there’s some kind of sticks-and-straw idol inside. Fuuuuuck no.

The thing about the woods in the human psyche is that it is vast and dense and you can’t see everything that’s inside. Same with mountain caverns and the deep reaches of the ocean. You don’t know what’s in there, and whatever it is could very well have been hiding out for thousands of years. Even scarier, then, is when the untouched nature of the deep forest shows signs of order. The Blair Witch Project did a phenomenal job with this, hanging crudely bundled stick figures from the trees and putting child-sized hand-prints on the cabin walls. Once it gets going, The Ritual borrows a lot from Blair Witch, from the barely visible monster striking at night to the ice-cold terror of hearing a friend’s screams from the omnidirectional nothingness of the woods. As the film goes on, it starts to borrow from primitive-ritual horror like The Wicker Man or Kill List. Nothing feels overly ripped off, in part because the suspense is carried off so well. Bruckner’s camera stares into the abyss of the woods and lets the woods stare back. The surrealism of the friends’ bizarre dreams never feels like much of a cheat. And the performers get to dig into some real emotions.

The cast isn’t exactly being asked to do Hamlet, but they’re up to the task. Rafe Spall has shined in smaller roles, from Life of Pi to the Cameron Crowe Showtime series Roadies. He’s the son of Timothy Spall, who you likely remember from the Harry Potter movies or Mr. Turner. Another familiar face among the four friends is Robert James-Collier, best known as Thomas from Downton Abbey. Honestly, it’s a wonder that Brit horror films aren’t constantly populated by Downton alums, but this is a good start.

The Ritual loses some of its momentum in the final third, falling prey to the frequent temptation in horror to show just a little bit more than they should. The rule is that you should never fully see the monster, and while Bruckner does a bang-up job making sure that what we do see is terrifying in its impossibility, that’s still probably a rule that should be followed.

Still, though, what a hugely promising solo directing debut for Bruckner, whose previous feature directing has been on anthology efforts like V/H/S and The Signal. A lot of small horror films tend to look like garbage, even when their concepts and energy are fresh. The Ritual is a creepy, freaky slice of terror that knows exactly where it wants to put its audience and will effectively scare the pants off you.

Stream The Ritual on Netflix