Rafe Spall

(Netflix Streaming, August 2018) Oh no, four guys go hiking in the woods in another country! Oh no, one of them gets injured! Oh no, they take a shortcut off the map! Oh no, they see weird things! Oh no, strange people surround them! Oh no, I don’t think this is going to end well! … that’s right, The Ritual is just about the most ordinary film about the most ordinary horror elements you can think of. Rafe Spall stars, David Bruckner directs and the audience endures. There’s a whole lot of nonsense in the film that makes it hard to care about any of it—the moment that hallucinations come into any horror movie, then it’s a free license for the filmmakers to do anything and everything, considerably lowering the stakes. A description of this film’s monster ends up causing a big “so what”. The Ritual isn’t that scary, isn’t that funny, isn’t that anything. It’s thoroughly mediocre in the most average sense of the word. I suppose it will do the trick for those looking for familiar thrills—I mean, it’s not that bad—, but it doesn’t really doesn’t go anywhere beyond that.