The Ritual (2017)

The Ritual is a British folk horror film from 2017 in which four university friends go hiking in Sweden and are picked off, with some efficiency, by an ancient moose-shaped deity named Moder. The film has an agenda, though it is not a social one. Its agenda is to unsettle. This is a rare vintage, a horror picture that trusts the forest, the guilt, and a very tall thing with antlers to do the heavy lifting. The running time passes without a single scene in which a character explains to another character how the world should be.

The cast is four white British men arguing about grief and cowardice, and the film never apologizes for this or scrambles to correct the ledger. Their guilt over a friend's death in a robbery is the engine, and the horror grows out of ordinary masculine failure: the shortcut taken, the blame deflected, the courage summoned too late. No lecture waits at the end of the trail. The Swedish forest is simply a forest, an indifferent green wall that swallows men who made poor choices, and the Norse mythology is deployed as menace instead of metaphor.

Such a film could easily grow dull. It does not. It is lean and committed, and it understands that a monster is most frightening when we are not asked to read it as anything beyond itself. The classification comes back clean, ten markers and ten zeros, a symmetry that borders on the monastic. There is something almost restful about a film with no civic obligations. It wants to frighten us in the dark. It does.