The Ceremony Review
The Ceremony paints an arresting, and arrestingly bleak, portrayal of contemporary Britain. It’s the feature film debut from writer-director Jack King, mixing stylised lyricism with an unblinking view of multicultural complexity, and arriving at an apposite moment when real-world tensions are at an all-time high.
Bradford-based King, a decades-long veteran of short films, wrings striking performances from his leads. The compelling and taciturn Tudor Cucu-Dumitrescu portrays Cristi, a Romanian illegal migrant who helps manage a Yorkshire car wash. When a colleague is accused of stealing a customer’s watch, it sets off a tragic chain of events. This prompts Cristi to reluctantly unite with Kurdish co-worker Yusuf (Erdal Yildiz), their journey taking them deep into the uncompromising, windswept heart of the Yorkshire Dales to dispose of a body.
The Christian-raised Cristi clashes with Yusuf, who insists that the body be given a Muslim burial. As they tour the contours of the harsh landscape, it seems unlikely that their mutual suspicions will ever be alleviated. Even a tentative conversation in a pub suggests common ground before giving way to barbed viciousness.
The look of The Ceremony is all-encompassing and highly impressive. Cinematographer Robbie Bryant, who has worked as a camera assistant on the likes of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, transforms the relatively commonplace Yorkshire landscape into a perpetually shifting, allegorical mass of light and shade. It brims with the possibility of both damnation and redemption, against which King’s relatively pragmatic screenplay acts as a counterweight. If Bryant draws from the likes of Carl Theodor Dreyer, King is seemingly inspired by Ken Loach and Andrea Arnold. King sketches a portrayal of hard-scrabble existence in which even the most compassionate decision threatens to have dire consequences.
It’s a film that possesses both painful topicality and the eerie mysticism of an archetypal fable. King elicits a strong sense of authenticity from his multi-lingual cast and location shooting, impressively mounted on a micro-budget of £120,000 while mixing professional actors Cucu-Dumitrescu and Yildiz with non-professionals.
For all the glimmers of light in Bryant’s awe-inspiring visual palette, there isn’t much on a narrative basis. The Ceremony is unremittingly austere and the attempts at more esoteric sequences, one of which involves a goat not unlike the one seen in Robert Eggers‘s The Witch, start to strain the patience. That said, the movie is an important palliative for contemporary times. It dares to suggest that walls can be surmounted and barriers overcome, even if only for an achingly short time.
★★★★
In UK cinemas from August 22nd/ Tudor Cucu-Dumitrescu, Erdal Yildiz, Mo’min Swaitat / Dir: Jack King / Tull Stories / 15
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