Some horror films scare you with what they show. The Ritual scares you with where it takes you — and the creeping certainty that the forest you’ve walked into has no intention of letting you out.
Directed by David Bruckner — who would later go on to direct The Black Phone and the Hellraiser reboot — and based on Adam Nevill’s 2011 novel of the same name, The Ritual debuted in UK cinemas in October 2017 before landing on Netflix in February 2018. It arrived quietly and built its reputation through word of mouth. That reputation is deserved.
The Ritual (2017)
The Story: Four friends hike through a Swedish forest to honour a dead friend. The forest has other plans.
🎬 Our opinion: Bruckner takes every familiar element of forest horror and executes each one with more craft and atmosphere than you’d expect. The mythology angle elevates it above the genre average. The finale divided audiences — I loved it.
Director: David Bruckner · Cast: Rafe Spall, Rob James-Collier, Sam Troughton, Arsher Ali
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Powered by JustWatchThe Story: What The Ritual Is About
Five friends plan a hiking trip through Sweden’s Sarek National Park. Before they leave, one of them — Rob — is killed during a robbery gone wrong. Six months later, the remaining four set out anyway, determined to honour his memory.
They don’t make it far before things go wrong. Mutilated animals. Strange symbols carved into trees. Occult objects in abandoned cabins. Something is in the forest with them. Something that has been there for a very long time.
The Ritual: Trailer
Review: The Ritual (Spoiler-Free)
The first thing The Ritual gets right is its setting. The (Scandinavian) forest — vast, ancient, and utterly indifferent to human presence — does most of the heavy lifting before anything supernatural has even happened. The trees swallow the group. The trails disappear. Darkness and disorientation become enemies before whatever is hunting them does. I find that sequencing precise: by the time the film reveals what is out there, you are already convinced that the forest itself is hostile.
The performances are strong across the board. Rafe Spall carries the film’s emotional weight — guilt, grief, and the particular strain of male friendship that doesn’t know how to talk about either — without ever tipping into melodrama. The group dynamic feels lived-in and believable, which matters enormously in a film that depends on you caring whether these people survive.
The film draws inevitable comparisons to The Blair Witch Project — four people, a forest, something they can’t see — and they’re not entirely wrong. But The Ritual is more direct and considerably less subtle than Blair Witch. Where Blair Witch withholds everything, Bruckner eventually shows his hand, blending cabin horror, backwoods brutality, and Norse mythology into something that feels genuinely original despite its familiar components. It’s a combination I didn’t expect to work as well as it does.
The camerawork deserves special mention — many scenes derive their unsettling authenticity directly from how they’re shot, and Bruckner uses the forest’s natural darkness with real intelligence. And unlike many horror films that throw in a supernatural element as an afterthought, The Ritual earns its monster. The mythological dimension gives the film a texture that pure survival horror rarely achieves.
Did you know?
The film was not shot in Sweden at all — the entire production took place in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. The Swedish wilderness you see on screen is entirely constructed from Romanian forest. A Swedish viewer actually pointed out on IMDB that the nature doesn’t look like Sweden at all — which makes the illusion all the more impressive for everyone else.
The one element that divided audiences is the finale. Some viewers found the resolution undercooked after such a disciplined buildup — feeling that the film lost its nerve at the moment it needed it most. I disagree. I find the finale the most interesting part of the film — the moment where The Ritual fully commits to its mythological ambitions and goes somewhere genuinely unexpected. It won’t be for everyone. It was absolutely for me. But you can’t please everyone, right?
Oh – i almost forgot: One classic genre element makes its obligatory appearance. Yes, someone twists their ankle. You will see it coming. So will they. They go into the forest anyway.
Verdict
The Ritual doesn’t reinvent the forest horror genre. What it does is execute it with more craft, more atmosphere, and more mythological ambition than almost anything else in the subgenre. David Bruckner knows exactly how to use a forest — and exactly how long to keep you in it before showing you what lives there.
If you’ve ever felt uneasy walking through trees at dusk, The Ritual will remind you why.
Where to Watch The Ritual
Powered by JustWatchSimilar Films to The Ritual
The Ritual sits at the intersection of folk horror, survival thriller, and creature feature — which means its closest relatives come from several different directions. If one element hooked you more than the others, start there.
The Descent (2005) — Six women explore an uncharted cave system and encounter something that shouldn’t be there. The closest comparison in terms of sustained claustrophobic dread and creature design. One of the best British horror films ever made.
Trollhunter (2010) — Found footage, Scandinavian wilderness, ancient creatures from Norse mythology. The tonal opposite of The Ritual — deadpan where this is dread — but sharing the same mythological DNA. Read our full review.
Eden Lake (2008) — A couple’s weekend retreat is ruined by a group of increasingly violent locals. British, brutal, and relentlessly tense. Shares The Ritual‘s sense of ordinary people trapped somewhere they can’t escape, with threat coming from multiple directions at once.
Exists (2014) — Not the same mythology, not the same country, not the same format — Exists is found footage where The Ritual is not. But if what you loved was the sense of something enormous and hostile in a forest that doesn’t want you there, Exists delivers exactly that. Eduardo Sánchez knows his way around a treeline. Read our full review.
