The Ceremony

1/17/2026

There is a lot of potency in this monochrome drama, but I felt that somehow it managed to succumb to a style over substance philosophy rather than a more characterful one. Essentially it’s the story of a younger Christian Romanian lad “Cristi” (Tudor Cucu-Dumitrescu) who having had an altercation over a stolen watch with some of his Bradford car-wash workers, has to head into the wintry bleakness of the Yorkshire Dales with the elderly Kurdish gent “Yusuf” (Erdal Yildiz) to dispose of a body. Unfamiliar and initially distrustful of each other, the two men’s journey into the darkness offers them an opportunity to overcome some of the innate prejudices both have of each other, their faiths and their cultures. What does work really quite well here is the premise that people’s gang behaviour i