O Ritual

I know the reviews aren't great but I like Pacino and Dan Stevens, plus I'm usually overly forgiving with these type of movies, so I would have got some enjoyment from it.

I said would have because I couldn't get very far into it.

The reason was the camera which was so distracting. It was shaking with random zooms and unnecessary camera angles. I don't think I've experienced anything like this before, and hopefully nobody will attempt it ever again.

Baffling choice for such a movie. I guess if the director didn't want anyone to focus on his movie for a split second, then mission accomplished.

The film is about satanic rituals. We can say it's based on cliché themes. A young girl gets possessed by a demon. There are two priests in the film. These priests try to save the girl from this situation by performing satanic rituals. And the whole film goes on like this... From a technical point of view, the first thing that caught my attention was the camera movements. There were a lot of unnecessary camera moves. I guess the camera was constantly moved to add some action. Even in a random scene, the camera moves in a strange way, it shakes. We saw unnecessary zooms. This was disturbing.

Let's move on to the second point. The script was a total fiasco. Maybe the story could have been expanded, the background of the female character could have been explored. The script felt very incomplete, and the events were presented to the audience in a very narrow way. There's almost no depth in the screenplay.

The theme of suspense was kept in the foreground, while horror was pushed to the background. They say it's based on true events. Maybe that's why they avoided exaggeration, I don't know. This looks like a horror movie, but it's not. Actually, it's not even suspense. It creates tension in a few moments but doesn't lead to anything. It's not what you expect. For me, it was a disappointment...

Coming out of the cinema me and my friends couldnt believe we just watched a movie that really wasnt showing us anything at all. Where do i even begin? Bad acting (with 1-2 mini exceptions), THE CAMERA SHAKING ALL THE TIME FOR SOME REASON AND WE WOULDNT SEE CLEAR THINGS IN FRONT OF US, the script mustve been two pages long because noone said much things except of the psalms, the movie worked in silence for too long without showing you anything in the action. Felt like there was no order and not anything exiting happened. No jumpscares in a horror movie... Felt like a loop repeating being boring.

It's not a natural state for human beings to view the world in constant shaking, zooming in and odd angles - this felt like I was watching the world from a boat on waves. It really lets everything else down, and what could have been a great horror, becomes a motion sickness misadventure.

The atmosphere is great, leading actors are of course a stellar choice and the plot is (although been done a thousand times), solid. If you can get past whatever on earth the director was thinking giving the cameraman orders to 'shake like you're filming this on drugs' - it's not too bad. Last sentence: IMBD can you stop this ridiculous minimum character count.

There is absolutely nothing interesting about this movie. There is the setup and then everything after that is just the same old same old growling voice theatrics of every other exorcism movie since the exorcism movie to start the whole exorcism movie craze, William Peter Blatty and William Friedkin's The Exorcist.

Now, this movie on the other hand was run through a highly technical process called "tension extraction" to remove any trace of dramatic variance. It's just dull. All the characters are one dimensional.

The plot is threadbare if not simply cut and paste. No, truly.

Someone pitched it this way: "Think The Exorcist but involving a young woman being helped by an old priest with an accent and a young priest with doubts." And someone else said, "So.....The Exorcist." And the first person said, "No one remembers that. We'll throw in the mom from Everybody Loves Raymond. They'll remember her. And we'll call it The Ritual." And the second person says, "But there was a really good folk horror movie just a few years ago called that." And the first person says "Perfect. People will have forgotten what that was about and think this is the latest quick reboot and hand over their money like the dolts they are. Get me the oldest actor on the planet to play the one priest. Is the guy from Cruising still alive?"

And within the next four minutes a script was finished by a malfunctioning AI, Pacino's agent told the studio where to park the truckload of money, and the film wrapped production so fast Roger Corman's corpse tripped a California seismograph rolling so hard over in his grave.

This piece of garbage movie is everything that is wrong with everything in the world. There is no thought put into anything anymore. It is all about rushing out rehashed tripe to take cash from the masses.