Director: David Bruckner
Screenplay: Joe Barton, based on the novel The Ritual by Adam Nevill
Starring: Rafe Spall, Robert James-Collier, Arsher Ali, Sam Troughton
Running Time: 94 minutes
Genre: Horror
Five middle-aged friends, Luke (Spall), Hutch (James-Collier), Phil (Ali), Dom (Troughton) and Rob (Paul Reid), meet up in a London pub to plan a guy's holiday. Immediately afterwards Rob is killed in a liquor store robbery. Six months later, the other four friends are on a hiking holiday in Sweden, partly as a tribute to Rob. However, the group are unprepared and inexperienced with wilderness survival. As tempers fray, the weather takes a turn for the worse and one of the group suffers a twisted ankle. The guys decide that, instead of continuing with their planned two day hike, they will take a shortcut through a thick, dark forest. Now, anyone who has ever seen a horror film knows that this is a big mistake. The men soon realise their mistake when they get hopelessly lost and discover a freshly killed animal carcass suspended in the trees, and strange runic markings carved into the tree trunks. Spending the night in a run-down cabin in the forest makes the bad situation a whole lot worse.
Based on a successful novel from British horror author Adam Nevill, this film never really works, mainly because the four central characters are all pretty unlikeable. There isn't much backstory given to them, and they spend most of their time bickering and trading apparently jokey insults at each other, but it is hard to see how they became friends in the first place, because most of the time they don't even seem to like each other. It does have something to say about how men find it so difficult to open up about their problems and anxieties even among their closest friends, and also how male friendship often works, with an apparent superficial, light and sometimes almost cruel surface, but with a lot of deeper undercurrents hidden beneath it all. It also deals with the very real but inevitable horror of simply getting older. It's worth pointing out that this is almost an entirely male film, the only women on screen appear very briefly towards the end. After a brutal pre-credits robbery sequence, the film moves into a quieter tone of a Blair Witch-style lost in the woods film, until kicking into high gear for the climax. The thing that stalks the group is mostly hidden, you hear it's roars and see the trees shaking, alongside the occasional dismembered corpses of it's victims strung up in the trees, with occasional half-seen glimpses of a large creature, until it's revealed in all it's CGI glory towards the end. The climax feels kind of rushed. It's not a very scary film, and it is kind of frustrating because despite some good sequences and ideas, the whole just didn't really work for me, and it felt like it should have been so much better.
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