Rating: ★½

The exorcism film has been around since The Exorcist (1973). It shows no signs of stopping fifty years on with there being a number of big studio production being put out in recent years. The downside of this is that the genre has become stuck in a tired rut this half century, churning through all the familiar moves of Catholic priests chanting rites, the possessed in cracked face, vomiting, mouthing obscenities, levitating, taunting the exorcists with personal knowledge. You all know the story by now and there has been little variation on this. (For a more detailed overview see Possession Films).

One turn that the genre took in recent years was a series of films based on supposed ‘true-life claims’ of real exorcisms. This began with the reasonable hit of Scott Derrickson’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), which made claims to be based on the true story of Annelise Michel who died during an exorcism in the 1970s (although the film widely embellished the actual details to the point of almost total fiction). This was followed by a legion of other films that came appended by the ‘based on a true story’ claim with The Rite (2011), The Conjuring (2013), Deliver Us From Evil (2014), The Crucifixion (2017), Veronica (2017), The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021), The Exorcism in Amarillo (2020), The Pope’s Exorcist (2023) and The Deliverance (2024). (All of these fall into Films That Make Dubious Claims to Be Based on True Stories).

In this case, The Ritual is based on the story of Emma Schmidt (1882-1941), born of German immigrants who lived in Earling, Iowa. She reportedly exhibited a revulsion to holy objects, refused to enter a church and demonstrated unnatural sexual interest. The German priest Father Theophilus Reisinger performed an exorcism that started in 1912 and was again repeated in 1928. A book was published about this with Begone, Satan! A True Account of an Exorcism in Earling, Iowa in 1928 (1935) by Father Carl Vogl where Emma was referred to as Anna Ecklund. The story had previously been filmed as the low-budget The Exorcism of Anna Ecklund (2016).

The Ritual was the third film for David Midell. Prior to this, Midell had directed two well regarded non-genre works with the autism film NightLights (2014) and The Killing of Kenneth Chamberlain (2019) about a true-life police violence incident. Midell has also served as producer on genre works like the timeloop film The Fare (2018), the black widow thriller Forever Mine (2022) and the tv series Grounded (2022), a comedy about a superhero under Covid lockdown.

The Ritual goes to the extent of making great claims about how the Emma Schmidt exorcism was the ‘most well-documented in American history.’ I have some issues with the veracity of this as I do not believe demonic possession to be an existing phenomenon or that the deeply flawed Catholic Church are the just defenders of good against evil.

That said, the film appears to follow the recorded details of the Emma Schmidt exorcism to a reasonable degree of accuracy. Although one of the biggest bugbears about this is that the film has a setting of 1928 and yet has the exorcism and the Catholic service taking place in English as opposed to Latin. However, the first American service to take place in English was not conducted until 1964 following the Vatican II Conference. One point that you never see in exorcism films, including The Exorcist, which was well researched, is that the Catholic ritual of exorcism was always conducted in Latin and not actually translated into English until 1999.

The sad disappointment about The Ritual and The Pope’s Exorcist is that both are big studio productions that are based on exorcism stories that are as close as possible to whatever goes on in terms of the real thing – The Ritual based on the ‘most well-documented case in American history’ and The Pope’s Exorcist based on the story of The Vatican’s officially appointed exorcist. You would think that their closeness to the source would be a great opportunity to peel away the cliches of far too many bad possession and exorcism films and tell the truth about what really goes on. However, in both cases, the films do nothing more than trot out yet another copy of The Exorcist that cycles through the same old tired moves of the genre.

In fact, this makes for utterly tedious watching when it comes to The Ritual. It goes through every single move – the wall climbing, the vomiting, the tauntings, the cracked face, objects being remotely moved around, the toll taken on the priests and so on. About the only cliché we don’t get is the one where the aging priest has a weak heart and collapses mid-ritual and the young priest is forced to take over despite his wavering faith.

The film gets a casting coup with Al Pacino as the priest. Now, I regard Pacino as one of the great living American actors, although at 85 years old in real life he is starting to look a bit worn. Part of this is that he has been made up to look haggard and with a wild mop of hair and beard like the real Father Theophilus Reisinger, the upshot of which is that it serves to make him look like a homeless person who has strayed on set. The disappointment is that, great actor and all that he is, Pacino does nothing distinctive or interesting with the role and it is an eminently forgettable performance in his oeuvre. Indeed, Pacino had far more fun when he was on the other side of the fence, giving a dynamic showboating performance as The Devil in The Devil’s Advocate (1997).

On the plus side, Dan Stevens plays intent and serious as the junior priest. Ashley Greene doesn’t do much to get third billing. There’s also an appearance from Patrick Fabian for a couple of scenes as the bishop. Fabian gives an enormously entertaining performance as the exorcist in one of the best Found Footage exorcism films The Last Exorcism (2010), one work that does cleverly subvert the cliches of the genre.

Trailer here