Adapting the novel of the same name by author Adam Nevill, screenwriter Joe Barton (not the hyper-aggro footballer, as far as we can tell) and director David Bruckner have an interesting story and some solid ideas and characters to work with here in The Ritual, but they also have a bit of a problem. How do you make a horror film about a group of people getting lost in the woods and encountering spooky business feel new when we’ve already seen it hundreds of times before? Still, the great thing about horror films like this, with tried and tested mechanics, is that when they’re put together right they work. The atmosphere in The Ritual is great. It’s tense and creepy. It’s nicely photographed, with the woods seeming to expand further and further outwards while simultaneously closing in on the characters. As they move through the woods, everything looks the same but different. The pacing is good too, so when the characters start to unravel we’re ready for it. It feels deserved; with what they’re going through, they should be distressed, but it also doesn’t last so long as to ever feel too much. The characters are all alright; they feel real and are really well acted. As with the set-up, we’ve seen all of them before. It’s hard not to feel like these guys were perhaps too busy playing rugby at university and missed their shift getting diced up in a campground teen slasher and so are getting to the woods 10 years too late. The build up work in The Ritual is deliberate and carefully unrolled, with a steady sense of escalation. The first hour is better than the last 30 minutes. The end isn’t bad, necessarily, but it arguably reveals too much of what’s in the shadows and certainly feels a bit flat. It could do with a bit more tension and a bit more hard-fought conflict. The thing is, none of The Ritual is bad. In fact, it’s very well measured and does a good job of what it does. It just feels like an exercise in okayism, though. The mechanisms work and it looks good and it’s enjoyable, but it’s hard to imagine it lingering in the memory. It’s familiar, functional and refined, like a Waitrose Blair Witch Project. The Ritual is in UK cinemas from Friday 13th of October.