Movie of the Week: III The Ritual

Alexa: So… this movie was not at all my cup of tea. If you’re a horror person, maybe there’s something for you here, but perhaps not. Its dreamy, creepy vibe is a bit more akin to some of Guillermo del Toro’s works than typical horror fare, though not nearly as artful. Though the film is only an hour and 17 minutes, it dragged for most of its brief run time. The scenes of the actual ritual somehow both dragged and felt rushed. The building blocks for an intriguing story are there, but it falls short in its execution. I’m all for a twist ending, but this one was unnecessarily abrupt and disjointed compared to the rest of the plot. I will say it was beautifully shot and the music was great. Those two elements set the tone for an enchanting thriller, but unfortunately the rest of the pieces didn’t fall into place.

Joel: One of the first things I noticed in the Netflix description of the movie was that this was a really short movie. Only 77 minutes long. So after I had been watching the movie for what I was sure been an hour and a half I paused the movie to find out I wasn’t quite twenty minutes of the way through. It’s almost amazing how much this movie is able to drag. There is a staggering amount of nothing happening in almost every moment of this movie. I know that the movie’s going for a somber tone, but it just comes across as dull. The plot is incredibly thin and somehow it feels like it still doesn’t explore the entire plot.

If there is something nice to be said, the movie does strive for dramatic visuals, especially in the scenes where we enter a character's mind. And while some of the moments border on pretty, the structure of most of these shots is such that it’s hard to see what we’re supposed to be looking at. It doesn’t help that nothing in the movie indicates what is and isn’t supposed to be important or relevant to the plot. Plot points drift in and out of the movie never to be heard from again. But it’s not as though they are missed. They would never have a strong enough tie to the rest of the movie to figure out what they were supposed to mean. This movie aims for surreal but misses it completely, landing squarely in the realm of nonsensical.

Chris: I swear I do my best to not try to nitpick tiny details and focus on major factors to determine whether or not I like a movie but for some reason the ADR work distracted me throughout this movie. I found myself watching to see if the audio was off from what was on the screen when a character was talking and it wasn’t exactly off but it didn’t seem to be on either. It didn’t seem to matter whether the characters were inside, outside, close or far from each other, everyone sounded like they were right up against the microphone in the ADR session and didn’t want to disturb someone in the next room. I don’t wanna say that’s the deciding factor into what soured me with III but I feel like most of the flaws I saw are also going to be seen by the other reviewers and I didn’t want to beat a dead horse with another dead horse. Also, the cinematographer’s life mission seems to be the next Zach Snyder, not that it’s a particularly bad thing but the influence is noticeable.

Jason: This story felt… disjointed. I suppose that may have been intentional at points but it really didn’t synch as well as I think it was meant to. Perhaps it flows a little better if you actually know Russian but the translations didn’t seem to be quite right in a couple places. I also agree with Chris that the ADR was a bit distracting. On top of that, the individual shots seemed to go on forever. They were pretty to look at and quite artsy-fartsy but they just never ended.

Beyond all of the critique, let’s talk about the horror element. Here we have a story that was like Alice (from “Alice in Wonderland’) playing the older ‘Silent Hill’ games while watching ‘Inception’. Being sucked into a different world, especially someone else’s dream landscape, is a scary notion. Seeing the world through their lens and watching their nightmares become physical is clearly terrifying. The couple monsters we see are pretty dang creepy. And the field of half buried women was an interesting look at how someone can interpret and internalize what others think of them. I think they could have spent more time there. The first half of the film was spent building up to the ritual and then we only get three proper segments of Ayia exploring her sister’s subconscious. There is so much more they could have done. And that ending. So sudden, so unnecessary. But it could have been bigger, had more profound consequences. It was a swing and a miss.

Overall, this movie was alright. I’m not blown away by it and I certainly wasn’t scared by it. The scariest part was when they were telling Father Herman’s backstory using pictures that had clearly been run through stock Photoshop filters. I could probably rant a while longer, nit-picking details about this one but I’ll let it slide for now.