THE RITUAL
Lost in the woods
RELEASED 13 OCTOBER 15 | 94 minutes
Director david bruckner Cast rafe spall, robert James-collier, arsher ali, Paul reid
“This is awful in every conceivable way,” one character announces early on in The Ritual. While the film’s not quite that bad, superfans of Adam Nevill’s novel will probably mutter the same sentence during key moments. Nevill has been compared to Stephen King, and this movie is clearly influenced by The Shining, in terms of on-the-nose visual homage. And as with The Shining, the adaptation is radically different from the original book.
Here, a first-act brutal robbery has been added, ostensibly to give lead character Luke a clearer emotional journey for the audience to latch onto. Then, we’re into the story as originally told: four old university friends, all of whom are completely unlikeable, go on a camping holiday together and encounter supernatural threats. In Nevill’s book, we grow to sympathise with awful people because their gripping situation makes us care for them. In the film, we’re really just waiting for them to get picked off. Worse, where the book takes an abrupt wild turn that changes the tone completely, the film takes a safer, more predictable path through the trees.
Nevill really is the UK’s version of Stephen King – he’s fantastic. Unfortunately, as an adaptation, this film is less The Mist, and more Dreamcatcher. Sam Ashurst
Nevill was inspired by a camping trip in Wales, during which he found an old car and two dead sheep hanging from a tree!