Fear in ‘The Ritual’

Finally watched The Ritual, since I have discovered that I am much less of a weenie about scary movies when it’s daylight, I already know the plot, and I’m rowing or spinning while I watch.

The monster in this movie is crazy good. The creature design is so uncanny, down to the skin texture on the hands whenever you see it touching someone.

Going to spoil it below, if you care.

What I really found myself thinking a lot about, though, was what it felt like the movie was saying about fear. The whole inciting incident is Luke and his friend Rob going into a store so Luke can buy vodka and finding it in the middle of a robbery. Through sheer luck, Luke is able to hide around the endcap when the robbers go after Rob. While they demand Rob’s wallet, watch, and then wedding ring, he’s plainly trying to screw up his courage enough to do some kind of action hero-style thing where he jumps in fighting with the vodka bottle as a weapon. He hesitates too long, and when Rob refuses to give the robbers his ring, they kill him.

1. If Rob had just given them his wedding ring, they probably wouldn’t have killed him. Which is not to say it’s his fault he got killed. He was complying up until that point and his resistance is understandable. But ultimately, him defying the robbers doomed him.
2. The setup felt such that if Luke had come out swinging, he would have gotten either himself or Rob killed in just the same way. The robbers were not being rational. But since they had a machete instead of a gun, that allows Luke and his friends to imagine that he could have been the hero and saved Rob.

Obviously, the big emotional conflict is about Luke’s guilt over surviving and his friends’ reaction to the fact that he survived “without a drop of blood on him.” That comes out in ways both very passive aggressive (such as when Hutch tells him “I don’t care what anyone says, I don’t blame you.” My god , man, just kick him in the nuts why don’t you) and later on when Dom flat out says “I don’t value your judgment” because he thinks Luke is a coward. This setup makes sense particularly because it’s an all-male group, so they have the added societal expectation of standing up to violence, of being protectors, of not being ‘weak’ by feeling afraid (or at least not being controlled by that fear).

The monster also plays into those feelings of guilt by hitting Luke with all kinds of visions of Rob calling him a coward and so on. Because of course, the monster is doing the hard sell of hey coward guy, if you just worship me you don’t have to feel pain any more. Which might be an appealing argument if you thought it would release you from the guilt and pain–and the root cause of straight up fear–but it’s a hollow pitch when you see how utterly terrified its worshipers are of it.

The film could have easily become a very standard, masculine narrative about Luke ‘manning up’ by facing his fear by fighting the monster and thus winning. I don’t think this is actually what the movie is going for, though I can understand why it could be interpreted that way from the ending shot. But what really struck me is:

1. Throughout the entire misbegotten trip off the trail, Luke is most consistently the voice of reason. First it’s not going off the trail at all. Then it’s wanting to turn around and just go back the way they came after the scary night in the hut. Then it’s trying to alert his friends to the creature. Then it’s wanting to avoid the signs of some kind of life because it seems like a bad idea. His friends take turns dismissing his fear–and Dom voices why when he says he doesn’t value Luke’s judgment–but the thing is, Luke is right. At every turn, the course that comes from listening to his fear might have saved his friends.
2. The first one to get killed by the monster is Hutch, who is the guy trying his absolute hardest to pretend that fear and pain do not exist. Ignoring these things doesn’t save him and is a driving force between dragging everyone ever deeper into the woods. While him and Luke both spend a lot of time dismissing any pain Phil and Dom are feeling–a level of macho shitheadedness that really irked me because I have victimized myself with it in the past–Hutch felt like the main driver on that.
3. After Dom has been prepared for sacrifice, he has completely changed his tune from his earlier anger at Luke for surviving what happened to Rob. He specifically tells Luke that he must survive, not that he needs to fight or defeat the cult–that he needs to escape. He doesn’t entertain Luke’s desperate attempts to reassure them both that no, they’ll both get out of here (this time it will be different!). Dom has, I think, come to the realization that there are things you cannot fight.
4. Arguably the biggest mistake Luke makes when fleeing is that he pauses to shoot at the monster, alerting it to where he is and seriously pissing it off. Trying to be the hero and kill the thing that killed his friends almost ends with him dead as well. He might have been better off just running and never looking back.
5. The one act of defiance that does work in the film is when the monster has caught Luke and is trying to force him to worship it. He is entirely cornered for a moment; running isn’t an option because it has caught him. His only choices are to worship the monster–and eventually become some kind of horrifying deathless mummy for all eternity–or quite possibly die by standing up to it. In that moment “I’ll just die, thanks” does make sense as a choice. He hits the monster with an axe, which startles it just long enough for him to sprint out of the woods. He doesn’t kill it, or mortally wound it, or do more than apparently piss it off all over again. There is no real fight. There is just causing enough of a distraction for him to start running again.

So at the end, Luke screaming at the creature from the apparent safety of open scrubland as it stays trapped among the trees isn’t some kind of barbaric yawp of victory. It is an act of defiance in the sense that he has escaped. But the monster is not dead, and he knows it. It will always be there, and there is no sense that he has the wild idea of coming back and fighting it. There are things that cannot be fought, cannot be vanquished. The only true defiance is to survive them.