As far as low-rent exorcists go, Al Pacino is no Russell Crowe

But there’s little to cling to at Saint Joseph’s, the Iowan church where, about a year before a crashing stock market threw the country into the Great Depression, Schmidt was exorcized for months. Though the “based on a true story” angle is played up by the film, it explores few of the more sensational aspects of the exorcism, like how the final session was a marathon that lasted for over a week. Cowen is almost two decades younger than Schmidt was at the time, while Pacino is about two decades older than Riesinger, but these details—which could add to the frailty of the priest performing these trails of stamina or the vulnerability of his charge weathering them—never come to bear on the story.

Rather, The Ritual follows a series of steps as religiously as if it was performing a sacred sacrament itself: The Holy Rite of the Uninspired Exorcism Movie. Emma goes through the standard-issue stages of demonic influence, with blood puking, body contorting, foreign-language speaking, and sailor-like swearing supplementing some half-hearted sexual aggression. As these symptoms and Emma’s physical condition worsens, Steiger finds himself plagued by doubt, Riesinger finds himself followed by a shadowy figure, and a rotating cast of nuns find themselves roughed up by a possessed girl.

This latter element becomes The Ritual‘s sole skew towards camp (aside from the inelegant ways it tries to mask its budgetary limitations), as the audience gets conditioned to expect at least one nun injury per exorcism attempt. Aside from this, there’s little to appeal to connoisseurs of low-rent horror. Despite a similarly heavy accent, Pacino’s performance is more grounded and conventionally satisfying than the charcuterie board of ham offered by Russell Crowe in The Pope’s Exorcist. Stevens too, sweats and frets passably, but the film around him can’t take advantage of the realism he’s trying to convey. In fact, its cheap jump scares often undermine whatever mood the generally contained setting and slumming stars have generated; this is too slow and quiet a film to try to goose the audience with big sound effect stings.

But Midell can’t fully resist the depraved desires of his genre. Eventually, The Ritual just becomes a bad possession movie that’s not pulling off its hokey scares, rather than a bad possession movie unable to fulfill its more down-to-earth ambitions. But the worst part is that neither way in which the film fails can muster the energy of the exclamation point in Begone Satan!, the pamphlet which documented the Schmidt case back in the ’30s.

Director: David Midell
Writer: David Midell
Starring: Al Pacino, Dan Stevens, Ashley Greene, Abigail Cowen, Maria Camila Giraldo, Meadow Williams, Patrick Fabian, Patricia Heaton
Release Date: June 6, 2025