Demonic possession peaked in the ‘70s with The Exorcist and hasn’t been bettered since, which means that every movie about the subject is necessarily derivative and old hat even before it gets going. This is as true of The Ritual (2025) as any other exorcism movie, or indeed any other movie titled The Ritual, of which there are so many that calling your movie that in 2025 seems like a deliberate attempt to bury it. But most exorcism movies don’t have Al Pacino in them.
I’ll warn you now that I’m going to be referring back to this quite a bit. Many would consider the Pacino performance committed to this movie a career worst, and his involvement in general a sure-fire sign that he’s siring children more quickly than he can pay for them. Be that as it may, a substandard Pacino performance is still a Pacino performance, and that’s exactly the kind of thing a movie like this, already condemned by its unavoidable evocation of other, better movies, needs to stand out.
Even the premise is almost comically familiar. As we’re reminded at the beginning and end, the alleged late-20s possession and exorcism of Emma Schmidt is the most famous and well-documented in American history. The Ritual isn’t just exorcism horror, it’s most-famous-exorcism-ever horror, which is asking for trouble. Some dramatic liberties have been taken – this, if we’re assuming that the entire story itself wasn’t a dramatic liberty in the first place – to freshen things up, but you know the deal. Schmidt, here reimagined as a pretty young waif played by Abigail Cowen (Fate: The Winx Saga) instead of the mid-forties Midwestern woman she was in real life, is housing a demon that intends to drive her to physical and emotional ruin unless it’s forcibly expelled by the pointed reading of relevant scripture.
For reasons, the “solemn sacrament” of Schmidt is to be carried out in the ramshackle small-town Iowa parish of Joseph Steiger (Dan Stevens, Zero Day, The Call of the Wild, Colossal), a priest whose faith has recently begun to lapse on the back of traumatic personal circumstances. That would be ideal for the demon, but the exorcism itself is to be conducted by Theophilus Riesinger (Pacino), a no-nonsense expert exorcist with an extremely contrived personal connection to Schmidt’s case.
The exorcism itself takes place over multiple “rituals” conducted over a handful of days, which is apparently a pretty severe condensation of a process that in reality lasted half a year. It requires not just Steiger and Riesinger but the entire parish to be on the same page, since every demon’s modus operandi is to push very personal emotional buttons and occasionally scalp people who get near it. This gives the sisters – played by Ashley Greene (Accident Man), Maria Camila Giraldo, Meadow Williams (Backtrace), and Courtney Rae Allen in a line-up that seems implausibly cosmopolitan for the 1920s, but what do I know? – some personal moments, but director/co-writer Danny Midell keeps the focus pretty squarely on its two leads.
This is perhaps just as well since so much of an exorcism movie is necessarily dependent on the earnest reading of scripture, and casting a stage and screen icon to do that strikes me as a particularly clever way of making it work. I don’t believe in God or demons or any other mumbo-jumbo, so exorcism movies, which are unavoidably pro-faith in that they’re about priests battling demons with the power of the gospel, have a harder time getting me on board. But Pacino almost managed it. He has a few quiet scenes with Stevens in The Ritual, and a couple of big ones with Schmidt, that feel legitimately stirring, and while the climax resorts to the typical big-scale supernaturalism of a demon pushed to the brink, it’s threaded with quite a nice message of togetherness and belief that kind of works.
Or, at least, it would work if the movie wasn’t filmed in a cost-cutting handheld cinema verité style that constantly makes it look like an episode of The Office. I tried not to be distracted by this, but it’s a serious problem that undermines almost every scene. There’s a looming close-up of a frazzled Steiger that made me think of This Is Spinal Tap, which is absolutely not what you want in a very serious horror movie.
Then again, Steiger’s a bit of a ridiculous figure throughout, since his job is largely to downplay the idea of possession and constantly suggest conventional medical attention even when Schmidt is doing obviously impossible supernatural things. It’s all part of his arc of embracing God despite having soured on the idea a little, but it rarely takes because the movie dials things up to 11 too quickly. It’s a nitpick, granted, but it prevents the audience from buying in, which is a shame since Stevens delivers a decent performance.
If this is how Al Pacino wants to pay his bills, I say fair enough. The reaction to The Ritual has been harsh enough that I’m left wondering what people are really expecting from such a movie in 2025. It’s extremely derivative, sure, and doesn’t include anything that you wouldn’t expect from an exorcism movie, but it’s also – detrimental budgetary shortcuts notwithstanding – a pretty competent and determined take on the formula that is elevated by even a partially checked-out Pacino. I think you can do worse.