David Bruckner’s The Ritual is a wonderful film, which I review here, and which combines rich allusions to other horror films while also doing something quite distinctive. In my review, I mention some of the more obvious references of the film, but here’s a less obvious one: Karyn Kusama’s 2015 film, The Invitation.
Spoilers for both films ahead.
At one point, when Luke (Rafe Spall) has gone ahead to see if he can see an end to the oppressive forest he and his friends are mired in, he looks across from a ridge and, down in the valley, he sees multiple fires burning. Events beyond his control will take him and Dom (Sam Troughton) down into this valley, and they’ll meet the people who set the fires.
Those people are worshipping a pagan god—you could say they’re part of a cult. And as one of the women tells Luke: “We worship it. It keeps us here—lets us live beyond natural life. No more pain. No more death. Your ritual begins tonight.” Luke asks why they chose him for the ritual, and the woman answers that his “pain is great.”
If you translate this scene to Los Angeles and to a slick, contemporary house on a hillside rather than a scattered set of wooden huts in a Swedish forest, you’d have the culmination to Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation. In this film, two damaged people, Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and David (Michiel Huisman), invite their friends to a dinner party—except it’s not really a dinner party but a ritual. It’s a ritual, moreover, designed to allow those who participate, as the pagan woman in The Ritual puts it, to get beyond pain, beyond death.
There’s a scene at the end of the film that parallels the scene when Luke looks out from the ridge and sees the fires, signaling the ritual, burning in the forest. Only, in this instance, Will (Logan Marshall-Green) and Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi) look across to the hills of LA and see proliferating red lights, each one of which marks the presence of a ritual sacrifice.
In two entirely different contexts, then, The Ritual and The Invitation show the powerful drive of humans’ desire to rid themselves of pain and death. They also show how often that desire involves the sacrifice of others, how often that desire is enacted on the bodies of others.
The Ritual is streaming on Netflix, and you can find The Invitation on Amazon.
Also highly recommended is the novel by Adam Nevill on which The Ritual is based.
