Al Pacino and Dan Stevens team up to take on the devil himself in the first look at David Midell’s upcoming horror flick. Check out the The Ritual trailer below.
“Emma is not well”, Al Pacino growls in our first look at his new movie. In a regrettable state of affairs, it seems Emma has been possessed by the devil. Oh dear.
Not to be confused with the 2017 folk horror of the same name, The Ritual started life as a Pacino-Ben Foster project in 2023 (Foster has since been replaced by the never-knowingly un-entertaining Dan Stevens), and its synopsis reads like a checklist of classic exorcism movie goodness.
Pacino stars as the (real) Father Theophilus Riesinger, a priest experiencing a crisis of faith (tick) alongside a colleague with a troubled past (Stevens, also tick), who team up to conduct a series of exorcisms on a young girl (tick, tick, tickety-tick).
Cue nuns, plenty of crucifixes and enough neck-cracking to give a chiropractor pause for thought, and you’ve got what looks like another exorcism thrill-ride in the style of Russell Crowe’s critically acclaimed The Pope’s Exorcist (other exorcism movies are available, I’m told, though frankly I’ve never heard of them).
More interestingly, the new trailer does show off what looks like a predominantly handheld shooting style, which lends the whole thing a nicely grungy vibe – helped by the obligatory pale-green wallpaper, of course.
The Ritual arrives in US cinemas 6th June 2025, with a UK release date still to be confirmed.
