“Your God, my God, our God, is freedom! Complete freedom! To do anything! Run faster than wind! Play till stars are tired! In this tree, the blood is sleeping, waiting for you to revive it. It will give you strength to grow. To be the best! And one day you will take the world by the throat and wring it until winter is dead and summer lasts forever! So touch the oak! Touch it! Grow!”
A neurotic, repressed Christian police detective is sent from London to a remote village in Cornwall to look into the mysterious murder of a young girl. After investigating, he is convinced the death was a Celtic sacrifice of some kind, which is borne out by the villager’s delight in taunting him for his religious fundamentalism. The policeman’s insufferable self-righteousness makes him impossible to root for and a ripe target of the villagers’ malicious pranks. They delight in sending him through a maze of wild goose chases and testing his chastity with their brazen sensuality. Ultimately, he is incredulous that the community seems to easily bounce between mainstream Christianity by day and the region’s traditional ways of nature worship by night, comparing the situation to the dichotomy of voodoo and Catholicism in Haiti. As a whodunit, the plot remains misty as the inspector’s sanity increasingly comes into question. The real appeal of Ritual for me was David Pinner’s florid language. A prolific playwright, actor and novelist, he has a poet’s delicate flair for allusions and metaphors, combined with a biting satirical edge that can be hilarious. Pinner sold the film rights to the book, but the filmmakers only adapted some key elements and crafted their own version instead, which became the cult classic The Wicker Man.
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