As Luke struggles with his environment, he also struggles to understand the divide that now separates him from his friends. In the novel, the wall is erected with less immediacy Luke is still single and working retail while his friends are married and raising children. In the film, this separation is marked by one event, a liquor store robbery during which the group’s fifth friend is killed and Luke is too paralyzed with fear to act. During their college years, they were inseparable but now a wall has built up between them. Luke feels outside of the deep friendship that binds the other three men. It is as much a danger as the mysterious thing that hunts them, something that is bloodthirsty, fast, and clever. In both, the foreboding forest is its own character, a twisted primal wilderness that swallows up our protagonists, dwarfs them with its unmoving presence. The Ritual, written by Adam Nevill, shares many of its key elements with its 2017 Netflix film adaptation, diverging primarily at both ends but sharing a common center. Adversity comes in the form of nature, cruel and immense, the supernatural, ancient and not subject to the rules of our modern world, and the strife that can arise between even the closest of friends in such harrowing circumstances. Within the depths of an ancient rotting forest in Northern Sweden, four friends become lost and hunted.
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