Jack King (2024)
Writing about Le corbeau (1943) recently, I mentioned black-and-white cinema’s facility for giving a story moral starkness and urgency. That was then, this is now: a monochrome film is unusual today – so unusual that you need to be satisfied that eschewing colour is more than a bid for distinctiveness, an attention-getting device. In writer-director Jack King’s The Ceremony, the two main characters are faced with an important moral choice – whether and, if so, how to dispose of a dead body – and need to act quickly. There’s no doubt that Robbie Bryant’s cinematography is bleakly atmospheric. Yet I wasn’t convinced that making the film in black and white served much more than a stylish purpose. Besides, a lot of the action happens at nighttime. Even though Bryant’s lighting of faces in the dark is particularly accomplished, it’s sometimes hard to see what exactly is going on.
Set in present-day West Yorkshire, The Ceremony starts strongly. A busy Bradford car wash is staffed by various migrant workers – Romanian, Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish. The snatches of conversation between them, sometimes in raised voices, hint at ethnic tensions and prejudices among the men. A blaring radio reinforces the soundtrack’s babel, though nothing is quite as noisy as an English voice that joins the commotion. It belongs to an irate white customer, yelling that his Rolex watch has disappeared from the glove compartment of his car. He accuses one of the Arabs, Nassar (Mo’min Swaitat), of stealing it. The matter is still unresolved when the workers head home – all to the same house, where their boss, Zully, has arranged accommodation. Later the same evening, the car wash manager, Romanian Cristi (Tudor Cucu-Dumitrescu), resumes the Englishman’s accusations against Nassar, who refuses to admit the theft and derides Cristi as Zully’s pet. Cristi throws him out of the house and, next morning, arrives at the car wash to discover Nassar’s dead body. He has apparently taken his own life.
The next person on the scene is Yusuf (Erdal Yildiz), an older Kurdish worker, who thinks the police should be called immediately. Cristi knows better than to do that because Zully’s entire workforce are illegal immigrants. The exact nature of other jobs that (we gather) Zully sometimes asks Cristi to do on his behalf isn’t clear. The boss is described by Nassar as a ‘nasty man’: Jack King doesn’t explain whether Zully has criminal underworld links or is a people smuggler as well as an employer of undocumented migrants. In any case, Cristi is sure that Nassar’s body needs to be out of sight, out of mind, without delay. The Romanian instructs the Kurd to help him get the corpse into a van. The two men then drive out of Bradford, into the Dales.
They’re soon in vigorous disagreement about the interment. Cristi comes upon a large, deep pit – ideal, he thinks, for safely getting rid of the body. Yusuf argues that Nassar should receive a more formal, respectful burial. When Cristi, who’s Christian, says that Yusuf wants this only because the dead man is a fellow Muslim, Yusuf insists that Nassar should be properly buried because he was a human being. For most of the remainder of The Ceremony, these disputes – and suggestions that the pair’s cultural differences underlie their discord – continue, sometimes violently. Jack King and Robbie Bryant construct some amazing images, especially the chasmal hole in the ground that looks as if it goes all the way down to hell. As already mentioned, though, I was sometimes in the dark, and not only visually. The narrative moves away from grim realism into surrealist moments. A ram, which first attracts Yusuf’s notice in farm buildings where he and Cristi stop at one point, becomes a mysterious, daemon-like companion, in Yusuf’s mind’s eye at least. The ram’s recurring presence is still easier to comprehend than why the missing Rolex turns up in Cristi’s possession (did he recover it from Nassar’s body?) – or why, when they eventually return to Bradford, Cristi offers the watch to Yusuf, who refuses it.
Over the course of the story, the whip hand switches between Cristi and Yusuf – understandable when one has the physical means to coerce the other, but that’s not always the case. The opening episode’s memorable racket is replaced in the Dales by a good deal of silence, and mostly sparse dialogue. Late on in the film, Cristi’s account of how he came to know and what he resents about Nassar, therefore sticks out as lengthily expository. It doesn’t help here that Tudor Cucu-Dumitrescu, though his face certainly draws the camera, is rarely as impressive delivering lines. Erdal Yildiz, admittedly with relatively less to say, is strong in both departments. Cristi and Yusuf dig a grave together. Nassar’s burial, accompanied by religious words uttered by Yusuf, gives Jack King’s film its title. The Ceremony was co-produced as part of the Bradford UK City of Culture 2025 programme. It’s good that it was made and goes without saying that its themes are interesting, but you wish they were more satisfyingly explored.
9 February 2026
