The Ritual (15) **

THIS initially promising but ultimately disappointing and generic British horror flick starts off with a group of old college mates out for a night of drinking. On their way home two of them, Luke (Rafe Spall) and Robert (Paul Reid), head into a shop for more alcohol only to be confronted with two violent robbers demanding cash. When Robert refuses to give up his wedding ring, the robbers beat him to death as Luke hides in terror.

Cut to six months later and the remaining friends have decided to go on a hiking holiday in a remote part of the Swedish mountains as a way to honour their late friend’s memory. When one of them injures his leg they decide to take a shortcut through the woods. But they soon discover a menacing presence lurking within that makes them wish they’d gone to Vegas instead.

It’s a solid set-up followed by some initially eerie atmosphere building when the lads first enter the woods and start to notice that something isn’t quite right – the kind of encouraging signs for genre fans that we’re in for a fun horror ride.

However, this potential gives way to a numbing, been there, done that and got the blood-soaked T-shirt series of exploits as the guys wander aimlessly around the woods yelping at every noise, happening across pagan artefacts and disembowelled animals and bickering over whose fault it is that they’re in this mess in the first place. The spectre of The Blair Witch Project in particular haunts the narrative to distracting effect.

Despite fairly amiable performances from Spall, Arsher Ali, Sam Troughton and Rob James-Collier as the increasingly terrified foursome, the characters never feel fleshed-out enough to make us care about them beyond fodder for whatever malevolent, potentially supernatural force shifts in the shadows.

It moves a lot slower than you would expect from this type of forest-dwelling horror and offers up too few genuinely scary moments to jolt us out of the glacial pace. And with much of the horrific goings-on happening off-screen in a frustrating rather than genuinely frightening way, we are led to a silly third act that feels like a maddeningly inadequate “is that it?” payoff for what preceded it.

While you can generally feel director David Bruckner’s affection for this sort of horror cinema – where characters descend into the deep, dark woods where things go bump in the night – the disappointingly generic screenplay never allows the film to fulfil its potential. Ultimately we have a horror that fails to see the scary wood for the run-of-the-mill trees.