The Ceremony Is About to Begin (2024)

Premise: Keith gets the opportunity of a lifetime (if you film documentaries for a living) when the leader of this group/probably cult agrees to be interviewed! Maybe he will find out what happened with his ex-girlfriend?
Alternatively you could say the premise of this movie is that Keith is a nerd that couldn’t get over this old girlfriend and she must have disliked him so much, she joined a cult. Being a very normal person, Keith starts to film a documentary about said cult, and what would you know, the current leader invites him to the ranch!
This is a movie that advertises itself as a mix of Creep and The Sacrament so you can expect both a weird cult AND awkward interviews!
Under 90 minutes? It’s about an hour.
Do they say the title? Yes they do, to much fanfare.

One sentence review: I spent a while trying to find out if this was a student project because I didn’t want to be too rude to the “we are clearly about five friends filming this during a couple of weekends” type of film, but apparently it’s not so…
Rating: Look, I like low budget stuff and I’m ready to forgive a lot when a movie is charming or has something going for it.
This got to embarrassing levels of “I really, really liked Creep and Creep 2 but I don’t get why those movies were fun”, to the point where they’re clearly repeating some scenes. Or maybe it’s an homage, I don’t know.
Yeah, it’s just an hour long but you’re better off skipping this one, friends.
A simple way to improve it: for like half of the movie I was constantly thinking about that “the funeral is about to begin… sir” quote from Phantasm which is also featured on Hearse by allegedly apolitical black metal band Marduk. So I think this movie would be way better if it featured a really creepy tall dude, floating chrome balls and I guess some dude tryharding in corpse paint.

Trivia about the IMDb trivia … movie?!
A way too generous letterboxd review says the last bit of this movie was filmed in a Egyptian Themed escape room. I know that’s bound to be a joke about how low budget everything is, but being a firm believer in “never let the truth get in the way of a good story”, I’m going to accept this as a fact.