The Ritual

by Mike McGranaghan

The Ritual really ought to be called The Rituals (plural). There are at least six exorcism rituals performed on the same person in the film. Why the singular title? That’s one of many baffling things about the picture, which goes to great pains to let audiences know the “true” story it’s telling was the inspiration for countless other exorcism movies. In other words, if you want to see the typical cliches in an earlier time period, here you go.

The year is 1928. Father Joseph Steiger (Dan Stevens) has been informed that Emma Schmidt (Redeeming Love’s Abigail Cowan) is being brought to his parish. There is a belief that her bizarre behavior is the result of demonic possession. A senior priest, Father Theophilus Riesinger (Al Pacino), will be performing an exorcism on her. If Emma is indeed being inhabited by a demon, it doesn’t leave her body easily – or peacefully. The entire effort to free her injures a young nun (Ashley Greene) and greatly unnerves Father Joseph, leaving the Mother Superior (Patricia Heaton) to hold things together.

A title card informs us that the Emma Schmidt case is the most thoroughly documented exorcism in the history of the Catholic church. Maybe that’s true. Whether or not you believe in such things is entirely irrelevant to the movie. That’s because the events it portrays – the ones that have inspired William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, among others – are well-worn tropes by now. Vomiting up black goo, eyes rolling back into the head, and guttural screams get hauled out once again. Writer/director David Midell fails to put them in any kind of fresh context.

Even worse, he doesn’t make clear what each ritual is intended to achieve, thereby rendering the supernatural scenes hollow. Midell’s directing style exacerbates the problem. The Ritual is photographed like an episode of The Office, with shaky hand-held camera moves and frequent uses of quick zooms into a character’s face. I kept expecting Al Pacino to look directly into the lens for a John Krasinski-type reaction shot.

What the film needed was to treat Emma as a full-fledged character, rather than as a generator of creepy images. Cowan is exceptionally convincing in the possession sequences, but that’s all she gets to do. We’ve seen a million exorcism movies that are about the priest. Learning more about Emma and seeing how she reacts to the process as a human being would have made it easier to forgive the familiarity of the material. Father Joseph’s story is not the one that’s interesting here.

Stevens, Greene, and Heaton are fine in their respective roles. So is Pacino, I guess, except that he’s capable of more than he offers as Father Theophilus. His characterization is limited to a scruffy beard and a wavering accent. The actors keep The Ritual relatively watchable. They do not, however, keep it from being bland. Like Prey for the Devil and The Exorcism, it’s the same old thing, just presented in a slightly different package.

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