By Jaxon
A 23-day exorcism recorded in real time with prayers, transcripts, and a weary parish priest doubling as stenographer doesn’t sound like typical Hollywood horror. That’s the point. In The Ritual, Al Pacino steps into the habit of Father Theophilus Riesinger, the Capuchin friar at the center of what many church historians call the most thoroughly documented exorcism in U.S. history. The film opens in Paris on June 6, 2025, aiming for something most possession movies skip: the paper trail.
Directed by Danny Midell, the 98-minute feature turns the 1928 Earling, Iowa case of Emma Schmidt into a tightly framed, pressure-cooker drama. It pairs Pacino with Dan Stevens, who plays Father Joseph Steiger, a local priest whose personal grief has splintered his faith. Abigail Cowen is Schmidt, a 46-year-old woman brought to the priests after years of failed psychiatric treatment. The story doesn’t rush the spectacle. It builds a room, fills it with doubt, and invites viewers to sit uncomfortably inside it.
Inside the real Earling case
To understand why this story still grips people nearly a century later, you have to look at the record. The Earling exorcism unfolded in three stages across 23 days at a rural convent, with Father Steiger documenting much of what happened. Accounts from the time—including those later circulated in clerical writings—describe classic possession signs: violent reactions to sacred objects, sudden displays of forgotten or unknown languages, and physical manifestations that defy easy explanation.
In the film, those details aren’t treated as cheap theatrics. Midell stages a final continuous stretch of about 72 hours, mirroring the most intense phase of the real case. Emma convulses, retches up unidentifiable substances, speaks in Latin, German, Spanish, and Aramaic, and at one point appears to lift from the bed. The camera doesn’t celebrate the shock; it observes it. When Stevens’s Father Steiger softly tells Emma, “You’re very welcome here,” the line lands as both pastoral care and a dare to the darkness in the room.
Pacino’s Father Riesinger is the still point. He’s not theatrical. He’s deliberate—the type of presence you expect from someone who believes ritual order matters when chaos is trying to win. The film underlines that idea with small choices: the measured pace of the prayers, the way the clergy consult the rite, the insistence on process even as the suffering escalates.
Authenticity was an explicit goal. Father Aaron Williams, pastor and rector of St. Mary’s Basilica in Natchez, Mississippi, served as the production’s religious consultant. His fingerprints show in the details—how the Book of Rites is handled, how the priests prepare, how the nuns pray in unison down the hall while the exorcism unfolds. That collective prayer becomes a character of its own late in the film, humming under the worst of the ordeal.
The production itself is lean. Budget constraints are visible in its handheld camera work and tight locations, mostly inside the convent rooms and corridors. But the restraint works. Rather than cutting away to bombast, the movie stays close, letting the ritual breathe and the characters’ choices carry the tension.
Faith, fear, and a film that refuses shortcuts
The supporting cast fills out the world without calling attention to itself. Patricia Heaton is a no-nonsense Mother Superior who quietly manages the human realities of a 23-day siege—food, sleep, privacy, the delicate duty of protecting a parish from panic. Ashley Greene’s Sister Rose and María Camila Giraldo’s Sister Camila keep the vigil going when the priests falter, while Patrick Fabian’s Bishop Edwards gives just enough institutional weight to the decision to proceed. Meadow Williams appears as Sister Sarah, one of the nuns whose steady prayers shape the closing stretch.
There’s some noise around the studio pairing. The film is linked to Buzzfeed Studios, an unusual credit for a project soaked in Catholic ritual. That odd couple has sparked debate among church audiences and horror fans about intent and tone. On screen, though, the movie keeps its head down. No neon cynicism, no snark. It plays the material straight.
Early user scores hover around a modest 4.5/10 on IMDb from a small pool of first viewers. That says more about expectations than execution. If you walked in expecting pea-soup shock and jump scares every five minutes, you won’t get them. The Ritual prefers psychological pressure and the slow unraveling of Steiger’s doubt alongside Emma’s torment. Pacino, meanwhile, does something quietly unusual for a star known for fireworks: he lowers the flame. Catholic reviewers who saw advance screenings describe his performance as marked by “calm, serenity, and faith.” That steadiness becomes the film’s metronome.
The script leans into theological stakes without sermonizing. At one turning point, Pacino’s Riesinger says, “Their goal is to make us give up on God. We cannot abandon her.” It’s a line with a spine. The movie frames the ordeal as spiritual warfare, yes, but also as a test of vocational promises—what a priest owes his parishioners, what a community owes a suffering neighbor, what compassion looks like when it’s costly.
Compare that approach with the genre giants it will inevitably be measured against. The Exorcist (1973) drew inspiration from a 1949 case in Maryland and Missouri, famously fictionalized. It paved the way for a thousand imitators heavy on projectile vomit, flailing beds, and head-spinning shock tactics. The Ritual pulls in the opposite direction. It banks on the real Earling dossier and the fact that in 1928, a priest sat and wrote, hour after hour, so there would be a record of what happened in that convent room.
That record has long fueled debate far beyond movie circles. Was Emma Schmidt’s suffering supernatural, psychological, or a brutal combination of both? The film doesn’t take cheap shots at psychiatry; it notes the failed treatments and then follows the route the community chose. In an era when conversations about trauma, hallucination, and religious experience often talk past one another, the movie asks a simpler question: what does care look like when you’ve run out of explanations?
Technically, the team keeps choices practical. The handheld camera places you in the room without drawing attention to itself. Light is scarce, but not the trendy “can’t see anything” kind; it’s convent dim, candle-and-lamplight dim, where faces matter. Sound design does heavy lifting—chants, breath, the scrape of a chair, the hush of nuns in prayer down the hall. It avoids sound-cue jump scares and instead lets the ritual rhythms—petition, command, silence—do the work.
Performance-wise, Stevens has the steeper hill. His Steiger begins skeptical, even allergic to the idea of restraints, determined to see the person before the phenomenon. Watching him slowly accept the scene in front of him—what he hears, what he smells, what he can’t explain—becomes the audience’s bridge into belief or at least into humility. Cowen, for her part, faces the thankless job many possession films hand to women: endure the unbearable. She layers Emma’s moments of lucidity with shame and exhaustion, making the relapses land harder.
If there’s a thesis, it’s that ritual is both belief and structure. The film’s title isn’t a gimmick. Repetition—the litany, the commands, the responses—becomes a stake in the ground against chaos. The final movement, the 72-hour push, is edited to feel like a single, merciless stretch of time, where sleep-deprived clergy make mistakes, regroup, and try again. The nuns’ collective prayer, introduced earlier almost as atmosphere, steps forward as a decisive force.
For viewers curious about the real figures behind the drama: Father Theophilus Riesinger was a German-born Capuchin friar known in the region for his discipline and caution around exorcism. Father Joseph Steiger was the local parish priest in Earling, tasked with both pastoral care and practical logistics. Historical accounts note that extensive notes were kept during the proceedings—rare for the era and unusual even by church standards. Those notes, later echoed in clerical publications about the case, are why this story keeps resurfacing in faith circles and, now, on screen.
Release timing is straightforward. The movie lands in Paris theaters on June 6, 2025, with a same-day global rollout. That’s a crowded corridor for genre films, but it also puts The Ritual in front of audiences right as summer season begins and word-of-mouth can either sink a smaller production or turn it into a sleeper. Given its restrained style and conversation-ready subject, it’s built for post-screening debates more than multiplex shrieks.
Will skeptics buy it? Probably not. Will believers find affirmation? Some will. The film lives in the uneasy middle, where documentation doesn’t end disagreement and where faith traditions insist meaning exists even when science has no clear answer. That’s precisely why this story survived a century—because a handwritten record from a small Iowa convent keeps tugging at the present, asking whether suffering has more than one language.
As a piece of filmmaking, it’s a gamble: a possession movie that puts its chips on restraint, ritual, and the patience to watch a room for nearly 100 minutes. As a conversation starter, it’s loaded. And as a performance showcase, it gives Pacino a late-career role built on gravity, not volume.
Paris gets first look, but the subject belongs to anyone interested in where history, belief, and cinema cross paths. The film’s quiet confidence—that the facts, the prayers, and the people are enough—may be exactly what draws audiences in. For once, the scariest thing isn’t the spectacle. It’s the record.
For those tracking release-day headlines and early chatter: yes, the budget shows; yes, the camera wobbles; yes, the pace is deliberate. That’s also the point. If you want thunder, the genre has plenty elsewhere. If you want the uneasy hum of a documented battle between a suffering woman, two flawed priests, and a community that refused to walk away, The Ritual makes its case.
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