Ghost are playing Rats. ‘They’re still coming at you / And there is nothing you can do’, goes the song. “But there is something I can do!” Tobias Forge/Papa V Perpetua shouts to a crowd of 20,000 devotees at Mexico’s Palacio de los Deportes. “Tear you a new asshole – each!”
It’s very generous of him. Filmed across two nights of the Skeletour in September 2025 and directed by the tour’s creative director Amir Chamdin (who’s overseen seven of the band’s music videos), this is Ghost’s second concert movie, 2 Big To Rig. While 2024’s Rite Here Rite Now was shot on the Impera cycle and spliced live footage from a pair of gigs at the Los Angeles Kia Forum with skits furthering the Ghost lore, this document of the Skeletá era is more about romanticising their show. It features segments with crew members talking about how logistically complex the production is. “It’s too big to rig!” laughs one – adding that, still, they manage it every night.
2 Big… opens with Peacefield, the first track on Skeletá, and is startling from the off. Shot on 16mm film, it looks like an 80s VHS tape, grainy and high contrast. The effect is jarring, but 100 percent Ghost, indirectly nodding to their mythology and evoking nostalgia for a past that never existed, as if they’re a historic band playing a seminal concert like Live Aid. Where Rite Here Rite Now crisply revealed every thread of embroidery on the band’s costumes, 2 Big… is a blur of Rhinestones sparkling in the spotlights.
Watching it on an IMAX screen, you’re simultaneously immersed in a thrilling analogue world where Ghost are all that exist for the next 90 minutes, yet confused about why you can’t pick out the visual details at such scale. At one point, there’s a clip of a woman behind the scenes, touching up the silver bones painted on someone’s shoe. It’s exactly the kind of detail that Rite Here Rite Now revelled in showing during the live parts, but this film deliberately obscures. The format does allow for a brilliant moment, though, where the kaleidoscopic prism lens effect used on Papa’s face during Majesty – usually shown on the stage’s screens – is blown up to the size of three London buses, a montage of ghostly visages filling your field of vision.
Of course, there are the songs. And what songs! It’s hard not to dance in your seat as the likes of Cirice, Satanized, Year Zero and the rest keep on coming. It’s louder than a gig – bring earplugs – and the camera work makes you feel like you’re onstage as part of the crew, getting up close with each person, seeing guitar solos from behind, and noticing other crew members crouching in the shadows. The crowd shots are genuinely beautiful, the camera looking out at a sea of ecstatic faces, some crying, some screaming, many painted in Papa makeup. There’s an emotional intimacy to this film that the glossy Rite Here Rite Now didn’t have.
Yet, as the title suggests, 2 Big To Rig also throws a spotlight on the sheer scale of the Skeletour production, via black-and-white segments with the crew. Ghost have a team of at least 120 people, plus a local crew of a similar size on each stop. The enormously heavy Grucifix that hangs over the band while they play is shown on the venue floor during set-up, and a crew member needs a leg-up to get on it. Of another part of the production, a man says, “You might not want to film this – it’s not working,” highlighting how much effort goes into making the whole thing look seamless. This is as much a love letter to the often-overlooked people who bring Ghost to life, as it is to the bandmembers themselves.
It’s also a love letter to the fans, without which there would be no tour. After Papa apologises for cancelling a show the night before because he was struck down by the “curse of Montezuma”, they squeal with joy. Whenever he speaks in Spanish, they squeal with joy. When he promises to tear them a new asshole (each!), they… well, you get the idea. It’s a lot of fun. In heartwarming footage from outside the venue, one Ghost fan proposes to another.
Seeing as phones weren’t allowed on the Skeletour, Ghost get to decide how it’s immortalised, and 2 Big To Rig is just that: a rapturous spectacle captured in an undefined time. The graininess is a stylistic risk and can be frustrating at times, but you don’t come to Ghost looking for normal. You come to be welcomed into a world like no other.
2 Big To Rig hits cinemas and IMAX screens worldwide today (Wednesday, August 26). Get your exclusive Ghost x Metal Hammer bundle, featuring a magazine cover and t-shirt unavailable in shops, via the Louder webstore.
