It's a Netflix original that you somehow missed at the time it was released, but you end up watching at a later date.
I say "somehow" because I have pretty complete coverage of the Netflix original films I ever wanted to see.
Watching one belatedly almost never happens, but it happened when I watched the 2017 film The Ritual on Wednesday night.
Why does this almost never happen? I should clarify, it almost never happens to me, but it could happen to others. Still, I don't think it happens much to them either.
Netflix movies, more so than most movies that debut on streamers, seem to exist for the exact two-week period after they were released. Sure, they will remain on Netflix likely forever, but watching them ten years after their release seems anachronistic. They were meant to be one-and-done in that first fortnight. After that, they're no longer promoted, and if you didn't catch the exact name when they were being promoted, good luck to you in trying to find them again.
This may not be uniquely the case for Netflix as opposed to the other streamers, but since Netflix was the first streamer to release a notable quantity of content branded with its name, it kind of created the template for this.
Why did I miss The Ritual in 2017? I shouldn't have. It's a genre film with plenty of apparent genre goodies. It stars Rafe Spall, an actor I have always liked. And if I needed further incentive, it's only 94 minutes long, the perfect length not to think twice about it and just press play.
I guess I'd have to say it was early enough in the Netflix original films era that maybe I didn't have the same sort of coverage I have today, when I'm running a review website and often reviewing a lot of Netflix movies in that capacity. I didn't get that responsibility until early 2020, in fact just a few weeks before the start of the pandemic.
Still, even back then you'd think I would have been scouring the streamer for movies to add to my annual rankings. But I guess I'm not appreciating how long ago this really was, and how little I'd established standard practices when it comes to things like this.
But then I looked in the Wikipedia pages devoted to Netflix original films, which I use surprisingly often. I'm mostly on the page for the current year, because I want to see if there's anything out now, or coming out soon, that I can review. But sometimes I go into the old ones too.
And I couldn't find it.
It appears the movie is not a "Netflix original" the way some other films are. It premiered at TIFF in 2017, where its international rights were purchased by Netflix. I guess because it was released theatrically in England by a company called eOne Films, it didn't qualify -- at that time -- as a "Netflix original." Since then, I think they've relaxed that stance, and take "ownership" over whatever they see fit to claim as their own.
I'm not sure how useful this post was, and maybe if I had realized earlier that The Ritual wasn't on the Wikipedia pages of Netflix original films, it might have skewered the premise of the post before I even started writing.
Also, the very idea that The Ritual has a short shelf life is sort of belied by the fact that I hadn't heard of it before I went on Netflix to browse Wednesday night, but it was placed before my eyes during a fairly shallow browsing session. If it weren't being promoted at all, well, I just never would have found it.
But then it also makes me wonder: Why did it pop now? Why do I never remember seeing it any time previously in the more than eight years since it appeared on Netflix in early 2018?
So it's an old Netflix film for sure, whatever path it took to get there.
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