Release Date – 30th May 2025, Cert – 15, Run-time – 1 hour 38 minutes, Director – David Midell
Two priests (Dan Stevens, Al Pacino) with conflicting views on exorcisms and possession are brought together to deal with a young woman (Abigail Cowen) whose case brings fear into the grounds of a church.
The opening and closing text of The Ritual emphasises to us that the exorcism of Emma Schmidt (Abigail Cowen) is a true story, to the point of it being one of the most documented instances of exorcism ever. To get this across in the film that unfolds in-between every sequence is shot like an episode of The Office. Crash zooms are used unsparingly alongside an occasionally wobbling camera to get across the fear being felt by the nuns and priests involved in the exorcism, but in actuality it simply creates a strange forced feeling that feels disconnected from everything else happening.
Perhaps this feeling also stems from the overall disconnect there is to be found with the film. There’s little that differentiates this from the many other exorcism films we’ve seen over the years and it causes The Ritual to feel almost overwhelmingly bland. There’s little given to Dan Stevens and Al Pacino aside from the former looking panicked whilst his co-star reads Bible verses in a faux-German accent.
Stevens’ Father Joseph Steiger is dealing with the recent loss of his brother. He continues with his work and keeping things ordered within his parish, with the help of Patricia Heaton’s Mother Superior. However, when it’s specifically asked that Emma is brought to New York to be exorcised, with the priest to do the job already being confirmed (Pacino’s Father Theophilus Riesinger), a darkness begins to spread throughout the building as fear starts to spread in the wake of a possible demon being brought in.
Steiger questions whether what is happening is the work of the devil or just a mental illness which more has been learnt about in recent years, this being set in 1928. However, Riesinger has seen cases where the victim was left alone, seemingly having recovered, only to be attacked by the same demon much more aggressively years later. Much of what we see involving the pair, outside of one or two quite conversations in the church pews, is in the various rituals which take up most of the 98-minute run-time. After one or two instances they start to feel repetitive and increasingly lacking.
Nothing new is brought to the table, and there’ little attempt to actually create any mystery regarding what’s being faced by Emma. It seems to undoubtedly be a demon possessing her, leading any doubt posed by Stevens’ character to fall completely flat. The bigger mystery is what he and Pacino are doing in this film. Again, there’s little for them to do and no major dramatic weight in the screenplay as it stands in the final product – and it doesn’t feel like a lot was removed in terms of character detail.
In fact, The Ritual has very little happening at all. It makes for a long and tiresome 98-minutes largely constructed of repetitive scenes which are building up to an exorcism. Apparently all part of the process, we don’t actually learn anything about the process or how it develops. It just seems that Emma gets covered in more scars and bruises and the demon begins to talk a bit more. Yet, none of it feels like development, the film simply feels stagnant and stuck in the same place until the end; which, when it finally arrives, feels similar to what has come beforehand in that it doesn’t really provoke any feeling. With a lack of effective build-up it certainly can’t be called an anti-climax. It just sort of happens, just before I shuffled out to quickly forget the film, and just remember how bored I was by it.
The Ritual’s biggest mystery is how its two lead stars came to be in it, a bland trudge of an exorcism horror it appears to go in circles around the same points with little development or detail. Largely just happening as it becomes increasingly boring.
Just A Little Bit Random 