‘The Ceremony’: Edinburgh Review

Dir/scr. Jack King. UK. 2024. 92mins

A pair of undocumented migrants in the North of England are unwillingly thrown together by the discovery of the body of a man at the hand car wash where they work. The two men drive up into the severe, bitingly cold Yorkshire dales in the hope of finding a final resting place for the body, but tensions between them build as the night draws in. The handsome black and white feature debut from Jack King starts strongly, with tension and urgency. The latter part of the picture, with its slow build of claustrophobic antipathy in the van, has a sober power but lacks some of the immediacy of the sparky first act.

The film’s perspective on its Yorkshire location is a distinctive one

King’s first feature follows a series of short films, including 2016’s The Crossing, which played in numerous festivals, and 2023’s Predators.The Ceremony premieres in Competition at the Edinburgh, where its combination of striking photography – the widescreen frame and arresting monochrome serve the story particularly well – and the unusual angle on an immigrant story should make it a title of some interest for festival audiences. Further afield, the picture might appeal to audiences in the north of England. The film’s perspective on its Yorkshire location is a distinctive one: no Wuthering Heights romanticism here, rather a landscape that is wild, hostile and more than a little dangerous.

Romanian migrant Cristi (Tudor Cucu Dumitrescu) is the unofficial right-hand man for the car wash owner Zully who, it is hinted, has underworld contacts. Cristi privately grumbles to another Romanian man about the “Arabs” his boss keeps hiring, but he keeps a tightly enforced order and maintains a degree of uneasy harmony over theworkforce.

This is all upended, however, when one of the workers, Nassar (Mo’min Swaitat) is accused of stealing a Rolex watch from the glove compartment of a BMW. He denies it and later, at the house the workers share, tensions boil over. The brisk, nervy editing and a tentative, disjointed score combine to capture the pressure cooker cultural collision of men forced to live together. Nassar dismisses Cristi as a “Romanian gypsy bitch” and suggests that his mother is a horse. Cristi doesn’t understand the specifics, but the laughter of the men who speak the same language as Nassar is enough to make him snap. He kicks Nassar out of the house and onto the street.

The next morning, Cristi discovers that Nassar has committed suicide at the car wash. The only other person who sees Nassar’s body is Yusuf (Erdal Yildiz), a taciturn Kurdish man who is newly arrived at the business and who views Cristi, as the boss’s representative, with a mixture of disdain and hostility. With no other option, Cristi insists that Yusuf help him dispose of the body – since none of the workers are documented, the usual legal channels are not available.

It soon becomes clear that, away from the city and the carwash, Cristi is out of his element. However, the looming hill country feels like home for Yusuf, who tersely explains that the Kurdish have a saying: “I have no friend, only the mountain.” And while Cristi is keen to offload the body as quickly as possible, Yusuf is determined that the man should have a Muslim burial. The strength of the performances goes some way towards sustaining the film’s uneasy atmosphere, but there’s a marked drop in the skittish tension that drove the film’s earlier scenes – and an over-reliance on a cameo from a quasi-mystical goat.