Miike’s film holds its cards relatively close to its chest for most of its run time, unspooling its tightly wound mystery like garrote wire before peeling back its skin of meet-cute artifice to reveal a pulsing mass of horrors roiling beneath. The Ritual is available to stream on Netflix.īest known for its brutally violent finale, Takashi Miike’s 1999 horror film as a whole is a taut and gripping drama that unravels its characters’ psychological hang-ups and neuroses before plunging headfirst into a heart of darkness and unsettling imagery.Īs we wrote in the inaugural entry of this year’s Halloween Countdown, The bickering among the core cast, though especially on part of Sam Troughton’s whining hypochondriac character Dom, alternates between a necessary diffusion of tension and a emotionally fraught accelerant to the otherworldly horrors in which they find themselves ensnared. But one trait about the film that doesn’t get nearly as much praise as it deserves is how subversively funny it is at times. The Ritual has a lot of things going for it - beautiful cinematography, brilliantly conceived dream sequences, a monster that manages to be both majestic and terrifying like an eldritch version of the Forest Spirit from Princess Mononoke. Straying off the beaten path, they soon find themselves stalked by a ravenous, malevolent force with cruel plans in store for the group, though especially for Luke. Cast: Rafe Spall, Arsher Ali, Robert James-Collierĭavid Bruckner’s 2017 folk horror thriller stars Rafe Spall ( The Big Short, Hot Fuzz) as Luke, an underachieving layabout who reunites with old college friend for a hiking trip through the Scandinavian wilderness in memory of a mutual friend murdered in a robbery.
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