The Ritual

Luke watches his best friend Rob get beaten to death during a liquor store robbery — frozen with fear, he hides rather than intervening. Months later, guilt-stricken and disconnected, he joins Rob's other friends — Dom, Phil, and Hutch — on a hiking trip through Sweden's northern wilderness as a tribute to Rob, who had suggested the trip before he died.

When Dom injures his knee, the group takes a shortcut through a dense old-growth forest rather than the longer mountain route. Almost immediately the forest feels wrong. They find a gutted elk suspended high in a tree — an offering of some kind. Taking shelter in an abandoned cabin, they discover a grotesque wooden idol upstairs. All four suffer vivid, personal nightmares and wake in disturbing positions — Dom and Phil prostrated before the idol, Phil having wet himself, no one able to explain it.

As they push deeper, something watches them. Runic symbols are carved into every tree. The group fractures under stress and fear, Luke's failure to act during Rob's murder surfacing as unspoken contempt. Hutch is found dead — torn apart and hung in the trees like the elk. Phil vanishes.

Luke and Dom stumble onto a village of elderly people: survivors of a forgotten cult who worship an ancient being, a jötunn — offspring of Loki. The villagers have been granted unnaturally long life in exchange for devotion and sacrifice. They capture Luke and Dom.

Dom is killed as an offering. Phil is found alive but hollowed — he has accepted the cult's bargain, trading his humanity for survival. Luke refuses. He is brought before the creature itself: an enormous, impossible thing, antlered and massive, striding through the trees with the weight of something genuinely ancient.

Luke runs. He tears through the forest, evading the creature, and at the treeline turns to face it. He screams Rob's name at the dark — defiant, refusing to die afraid. The creature does not follow into the open. Luke walks away into the light.