Parents' Guide to The Ritual

An absolutely dismal exorcism tale, this so-called horror movie is unpleasant-looking; not suspenseful, scary, or even the least bit interesting character-wise; and above all, boring. To start, The Ritual is cursed with ugly, pale, washed-out, handheld cinematography that's annoying from the first scene to the last. It somehow manages to wobble away from stuff that might actually have been scary, rendering several scenes inert. For example, Steiger finds several pages of scrawled writings by Emma/the demon, and the camera never holds still long enough for viewers to read them. The cinematography also manages to take away from the feeling that the movie is supposed to be set in 1928, making it hard to believe that these were supposed to be "true incidents" (even with the addition of a pre-credits sequence that includes photos and details about what happened to all of the real people afterward).

The movie's lifeless quality makes it difficult to care about any of the characters or what's happening. Stevens gives a stiff, unforgiving performance that makes Steiger seem like the villain of the piece, impossible to root for. And Pacino, who might have at least injected a dose of "hoo-AH" campiness into the movie, looks absolutely bored. There have been many terrible exorcism movies—The Devil Inside, The Vatican Tapes, Prey for the Devil, Deliver Us from Evil, The Exorcism, etc.—but The Ritual might take "possession" of the award for being the worst.