When Nepal’s most acclaimed (fictional) director – the only Nepalese director nominated for an Oscar – goes abruptly missing, the Nepalese police are oddly unmoved, assigning just two detectives, neither of whom are among their best, to sort things out, in this mystery drama from the smallish country tucked away in the Himalayas.
The Last Ritual begins, unpromisingly, as a police procedural, taking place in the sorts of unconvincingly austere office buildings and lecture theatres that often pass for police stations in films like these. We are introduced to our protagonist, a hard-working, hard-assed, yet oddly likeable cop hamstrung by institutionalised sexism. Naturally, it doesn’t help that she was the victim of a sex-tape scandal, which is now all her fellow officers can think about whenever they see her. All of the resultant stress, in turn, has made her an alcoholic like all the best movie cops.
So, off they send her with her sexist, moustachioed partner in tow, and soon enough the two are picking up clues, bickering, and slowly bonding into the bargain, too.
As it turns out, their target wasn’t missing at all, at least not involuntarily. We are shown in a parallel unfolding plot that he has taken his drug-addicted adoptive son into the mountains for some belated father-son bonding – though all is not as it seems, as we slowly and rather unsettlingly discover. In any case, our heroes follow the trail into the Himalayas and it is here that the film begins to find its voice, where earlier scenes have suffered from some overly-broad acting and the aforementioned sparse sets, failing to achieve the aimed-for atmosphere.
There are echoes of the likes of Se7en or True Detective in The Last Ritual‘s type of storytelling, combining religious/folk horror, the police procedural, and buckets of location-as-character atmospherics, but the closest comparison of all is the kind of “Scandi noir” everyone was watching 10-15 years ago. The exploration of sexism here is a nicely thoughtful little touch. The film doesn’t, strictly speaking, turn on the “scandal” that gives our lead her backstory, but it demonstrates a sense on the filmmakers’ parts of the wider context in which their limited-scale mystery story takes place and is woven well into both characterisation and the more immediate plot. There’s an exploration here, too, of the expectations of masculinity. You get the sense that all the characters here could perhaps blossom in another, kinder world – but that’s just not the gritty world in which they find themselves.
As our characters journey deeper into Nepal’s own Heart of Darkness, we get all of the added value that you might expect of a Nepalese production, i.e. handsome, rugged mountains accentuated by a terrific score of throaty warbling. This is only writer/director Pradeep Shahi’s second feature film, but his CV already incorporates one historical epic, one dark police drama, and a forthcoming science-fiction actioner. There is no question that Shahi excels at the writing side of things more than the often-ordinary direction, but The Last Ritual gets more than enough right to make Shahi the one to watch in Nepal’s limited film industry.