The ceremony is a bleak one. In the bitter cold of a winter’s night on the Yorkshire Dales, two men dig a hole in the frozen earth to bury a body. The pair are illegal migrants; so too is the dead man. His funeral comes at the end of a long night of the soul in this confident debut from Jack King, handsomely shot in black and white. It’s set in the world of dodgy carwashes, exploited workers dressed in hoodies and joggers, hands chilled to the bone. But the message is not overtly political, not straightforwardly social realist.
It begins strongly, tense and edgy, in a Bradford carwash. Tudor Cucu-Dumitrescu is brilliant as Cristi, a young Romanian man who manages the place, answering only to the nasty-looking boss Zully. The dead man (Mo’min Swaitat) has taken his own life after being accused of stealing a Rolex by a customer; Cristi doesn’t want to get the police involved so he tells the new Kurdish guy, Yusef (Erdal Yildiz), to help dispose of the body. This is all sharply observed – though a couple of details niggled me, like who leaves a super-valuable watch in their car while getting it hand-washed?
With the body in the back of a white van as Cristi and Yusef drive out into the Dales, The Ceremony becomes a kind of road movie. In the stark monochrome photography, the landscape is menacing and hostile. The camera often lingers on the men’s faces, like portrait photography. Cristi wants to dump the body, but Yusef insists on a burial, so they wait until nightfall. At this point, as the film becomes more ruminative, it does start to sag; there’s one dream sequence too many and far too much screen time given to a ram, as magnificent as he is. It’s a slightly unsatisfactory conclusion to an impressive film.
• The Ceremony is in UK cinemas from 22 August.
