The main cast’s acting is just fine. The only cast member to get a proper arc is Luke (Rafe Spall), the lead, though Sam Troughton does a good job at being the annoying, complaining friend, Dom. They do feel like longtime friends whose relationship has been severely strained. What I really liked about the film, as I touched briefly on above, is Luke's character arc. Luke is a coward, and inadvertently the one who sets the entire chain of events into motion through his impotent inaction at the movie’s beginning. The Ritual teases the viewer on whether the forest itself is malevolent and it's affecting their judgement. Each of the characters is haunted by nightmares, and wake up screaming or in embarrassingly revealing positions. But it's only Luke's nightmare that the viewer sees. Indeed, the camera almost never leaves his perspective. The film, I had hoped, was subverting genre tropes by setting up a payoff where Luke would have to face his cowardice and save one or all of his friends from the creature or would doom them all and fail spectacularly. Neither of these things happened, unfortunately.

The Ritual's positives, though, are tainted irrevocably by its ending, which completely undoes everything good about the movie by ironically living up to and explaining its titular namesake. The film’s creepy atmosphere, the unknown monster stalking them, and Luke's character arc are all ruined by in the film's final thirty minutes. The film goes out of its way to mar its mysterious monster and atmosphere by explaining everything with maybe four or five lines of boring exposition. The monster just looks goofy and silly when you finally do see it, and the revelations are sadly predictable. Luke’s character arc has tons of great setup, yet no satisfying payoff. He's still the same coward from the beginning of the film, concerned only with his own self-preservation and haunted by his own guilt. Nothing he does in the last thirty minutes changes that or comes close to some sort of redemption. I don't want to give any more away about the ending than I need too, suffice to say it's completely cliché and uninspired. Which is a shame, considering that I actually liked the film a lot for its first hour.