David Midell’s The Ritual, which is based on the true story of Emma Schmidt’s 1928 exorcism in Earling, Iowa, stresses in a text coda before the end credits that its central event is the most documented of its kind. But with the film playing out in such mind-numbingly derivative fashion, it seems less like Midell and co-writer Enrico Natale studied the documents of this case than they did the hoary tropes of this specific subgenre of horror film. Regardless of its historical point of origin, the film simply ends up joining the ranks of countless, tedious Exorcist wannabes before it, a robust trend that’s become its own special kind of hell.
After an unintentionally funny “so you’re wondering how I got here” mid-exorcism cold open, The Ritual properly introduces Father Joseph Steiger (Dan Stevens), who’s struggling with his faith and with leading his parish in the wake of his brother’s tragic death. It’s at this low point that he’s tasked with facilitating an exorcism of Emma Schmidt (Abigail Cowen), a young woman who’s been suffering from the symptoms of apparent possession since childhood. Alongside the experienced and esteemed Father Theophilus Riesinger (Al Pacino), who treated Emma once before as a girl, and an intrepid group of nuns, Steiger bears witness to a grueling multi-day religious ritual that proceeds like, well, any number of other movie exorcisms.
There isn’t much in the way of evocative mood here, as Midell employs an aggressively shaky faux-vérité style that inadvertently calls attention to the film’s chintziness, especially evidenced by the period-specific production design. But the scares are also on short supply, unless you find hair-pulling particularly unsettling, and The Ritual is so poorly lit and composed that it can be hard to make out anything of substance in many of the resulting murky images.
Brief moments of overwrought melodrama (not to mention the presence of schlockmeister Andrew Stevens as one of The Ritual’s many producers) offer the faint hope that the film might go in a campier direction, but the filmmakers ultimately play things too uniformly somber, with the respectable cast accordingly following suit. Even Pacino, in the kind of juicy DTV-adjacent role that he’s consistently been making a meal of in recent years, is disappointingly reigned in, as if bored with the uninspired nature of the business at hand.
Cowen has the most physically demanding role and commits herself to the requisite growling, screaming, and vomiting, but it looks less like bravery and more like folly when it’s in service of such a dispiriting endeavour. Furthermore, the filmmakers rather thoughtlessly take pleasure in the possessed woman’s demonic sexual deviancy, an aspect that has been thoroughly and tiresomely exploited since Linda Blair’s canonical “Let Jesus fuck you!” moment.
What’s strange is that the real Emma Schmidt, who also went by Anna Ecklund, was in her mid-40s when the exorcism portrayed here took place. For an exorcism film like this, honoring that fact would have been novel, but the filmmakers turn Emma into yet another twentysomething waif. Despite its emphatic claims to authenticity, The Ritual is really just another bland serving of supernatural hokum destined to be forgotten before you can say “Our Father.”
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