Watched Rituals
There are a lot of movies about people getting lost and injured in the wilderness while traveling down a river. There's Deliverance, of course, but also The River Wild... and Rituals, which I just finished watching after a failed attempt to complete it last year.
Rituals is a Canadian film I would describe as a "depression thriller." It's mostly just guys slogging through the wilderness and having a bad time. It stars Hal Holbrook, a character actor you will probably recognize from other famous movies... he was Deep Throat in All The President's Men, for one. He does a great job in Rituals - my problem with the movie wasn't him.
I actually had no problems with the movie at all until about two-thirds of the way through. It's very good at setting up a core crisis for the main character. He's on a fishing trip in the far reaches of northern Canada with his buddies, who are all doctors. It's pretty clear that he is the most stubborn and morally rigid member of the group, and as the story goes on it's also clear that he's the most committed to living out the societal role of doctor in the precise way society probably expects him to.
The middle of the movie features him struggling against his peers as they choose how to handle injuries among members of the group. Multiple of the doctors are killed or injured, and he insists on carrying an injured man across the wilderness as far as possible, despite the danger this poses to the group. (Not only are they low on supplies and far from help, but they're being hunted!)
I was expecting the ending to focus on this topic: when his commitment to doing what a morally upright doctor would do is tested, how does it break? This is very similar to the plot of Silence, which I liked a lot - they are both stories about people in positions of authority and respect, who are struggling to uphold the simplistic (but morally pure) beliefs they were taught by their institutions - beliefs which they must defend, lest those institutions abandon them.
Regrettably, Rituals abandons this plotline entirely in the final third. The villain finally appears on-screen but ends up having no interest in this big question about Hal Holbrook's beliefs or commitments, and the movie ends up saying very little about him. He's given a final choice that doesn't feel much like a choice and doesn't test his resolve very much. It felt like the whole movie was setting up a very specific crisis for him and his friends... and then it never delivered the crisis!
I do feel like I now fully understand why this movie is not as famous as Deliverance!
I love 70s thrillers... they are my favorite genre of film, and I've made a particular point of hunting down as many of them as possible over the years. In the mid 2010s I kept a spreadsheet of 70s thrillers and rated them along various axes for my own entertainment. I still hope someday to create an entertainment product of some kind which captures what I like best about them. After watching Rituals, I am already full of ideas for 'Rituals, but better' which I'll probably spend the next few weeks rotating inside my skull (before discarding them entirely, like I usually do).
What I'm saying is that it was a letdown, but I'm glad to have seen it!!