The Ritual is directed by David Midell, and the cast includes Al Pacino, Dan Stevens, Ashley Greene, Abigail Cowen, Patrick Fabian, Patricia Heaton, MarÃa Camila Giraldo, Meadow Williams, Enrico Natale, and Ritchie Montgomery.
My Thoughts on The Ritual
David Midell’s The Ritual is a film that tries to position itself as serious and historical, but what it actually delivers is a repetitive slog of priestly angst, overcooked melodrama, and loud noises disguised as scares.
It's a retelling of the 1928 exorcism of Emma Schmidt (Anna Ecklund), which is a case that is often cited as the most documented exorcism in American history. Set in a small Midwestern church, the film follows Father Joseph Steiger as he reluctantly hosts a month-long battle between a veteran exorcist and the demonic force tormenting a young woman (Emma), all while confronting his own crisis of faith.
We are guided through a seemingly endless series of exorcism sessions, all nearly identical where the scripture is read, Emma screams, and everyone looks vaguely exhausted. It’s a montage of monotony with the occasional sound cue cranked to 300% just to make sure you haven’t fallen asleep.
The film wants to suggest that it’s all about Emma’s suffering. After all, she’s the one foaming at the mouth, writhing on a bed, and speaking in dead languages like it’s her side hustle. But the film’s true subject is Father Joseph Steiger (Dan Stevens), a man tormented not by demons, but by grief, and doubt.
Steiger has a dead brother, a faltering belief system, and a church that’s barely keeping the lights on. So naturally, Midell decides he’s the interesting one, and poor Emma becomes a glorified stage prop, possessed less by Satan and more by plot convenience.
To its credit, The Ritual is impeccably shot. Cinematographer Justin Duval clearly took this assignment seriously, crafting moody compositions filled with shadowy corridors, candlelight, and all the visual shorthand of “spiritual crisis.” If only the script had risen to the same level. Instead, we get dialogue that reads like a theological TED Talk written by someone who skimmed Catholicism for Dummies.
The cast do what they can with what they have. Dan Stevens commits to the tortured priest role with the intensity of someone trying to win an Emmy on the wrong show. His Steiger is a man caught between duty and despair, or at least that’s what the script keeps telling us.
Abigail Cowen (Emma) throws herself into the role with full-body commitment, but the film reduces her to snarls and spasms. And Ashley Greene’s Sister Rose hints at depth to her character with a crisis of faith, only to be sidelined as emotional wallpaper. Both women are there to suffer just so Steiger can feel things, which is a recurring theme.
The women in the film do things, suffer things, experience things, but the camera always pans back to Steiger, staring out a stained glass window like he’s about to drop a sad indie album.
Then there’s Al Pacino, who strolls in as Father Theophilus Riesinger, looking like he just wandered in from The Devil’s Advocate and decided to play it straight. His accent drifts somewhere between “German priest” and “Shylock with laryngitis,” but hey, he’s got presence. He tosses holy water like he’s sprinkling Parmesan and stares down the demon with a look that says, “I’ve seen worse.”
And yet, with all this going on, director Midell keeps returning to Steiger, watching him journal his feelings and question his place in the universe. It’s not that this is inherently uninteresting, it’s that the film doesn’t earn it.
It demands we care deeply about Steiger’s internal conflict without doing the work in the first place. He’s not given an arc so much as an atmosphere of despair. And while grief and doubt can be powerful themes, they need to be grounded in character. Here, they’re more like set dressing.
The Ritual is a film that wants to be about faith, grief, and moral uncertainty, but lacks the clarity or emotional depth to deliver it. It tries to be meaningful but settles for moody. It hints at horror but mostly leans on cheapness. And it has characters that could be quite fascinating if they were given the time to be, but it instead centers on the one man in the room who spends the entire movie trying to decide if he’s sad enough to quit being a priest.
It’s beautifully shot, occasionally mildly effective, but Midell never finds the right balance that the film needs. The result is a film that feels like it’s fighting with itself, half prestige drama, half schlock, and somehow less than the sum of both.
Just watch The Cleansing Hour instead.