curated cinema: the woods are just trees, right? *gulp*

Have a Daily Scream for your daily-streaming recommendation for spooky season! (Explore last year’s Daily Scream films.)

Four British friends on a hiking weekend in a hilly Swedish wilderness take a shortcut through a deep, dark, ancient forest. This turns out to be a really bad idea. Now a… creature? monster? something is stalking them, but, hey, there’s a spooky cabin in the woods where they can spend the night.

What happens in the cabin is all the more shocking for how it represents ordinary human dignity being upended in simple yet unsettling ways. And this is only the beginning of their nightmare. The dread of 2017’s The Ritual is like that of a fairy tale of yore (the Grimm ones, not the Disney ones), or one of the classic episodes of The X-Files: primitive and atavistic, drawing on profound pain and fear.

(Read my 2017 review.)

US: stream on Netflix

UK: rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV

See The Ritual at Letterboxd for more viewing options, including in all other global regions.

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