The Ritual review – Al Pacino is priestly mastermind in tale of infamous real-life exorcism

Pacino is somewhat flat and Dan Stevens seems to be waiting for the final curtain as they with a young woman in Iowa apparently possessed by a demonThis low-budget, minor-key and – frankly – dreary horror feature offers yet another dramatisation of the 1928 exorcism of a young woman (played here by Abigail Cowen), known by her alias Anna Ecklund and her real name Emma Schmidt. The real-life ritual, which transpired at a nunnery in Iowa, was overseen by elderly German Capuchin priest Father Theophilus Riesinger (Al Pacino) and local cleric Father Joseph Steiger (Dan Stevens) and written up as a pamphlet (“Begone Satan!”) that went on to shape the public understanding of exorcisms.All that historical detail is transfused into a weak tea of a script, credited to the film’s director David Midell and Enrico Natale. They have generated a work that is a little more interested in background and context instead of sweary pyrotechnics and supernatural fireworks often found in demonic-possession-themed features, the most notably The Exorcist from 1973. But we still get bits of levitation here and there, and moments when poor possessed Emma seems to free-solo the walls of the dank basement room she’s locked in. At other points, she inexplicably vomits what look like tobacco leaves and speaks in a variety of exotic tongues. The men of the cloth stoically soldier on while an assortment of nuns stand by looking petrified and aghast. Continue reading...

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