The Ring Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)October 22nd, 2002
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
THE RING
Directed by Gore Verbinski
Rated PG-13, 115 minutes
Years ago, Mad Comics did a spoof of Ripley's Believe It or Not that featured a picture of a death mask from a tribe in New Guinea: "...said to cause death within 24 hours to all who gaze upon it. Too bad if you looked."
This, in a nutshell, is the premise of "The Ring", a spooky Hollywood refashioning of Japan's wildly popular 1998 horror thriller "Ringu", which has become something of a cottage industry over there, sweeping Asia like the flu, with a sequel and a prequel in theaters before the celluloid was dry on the original. Like "The Blair Witch Project", "The Ring" creates an urban legend and builds it into a nightmare that won't go away. Unlike "Blair Witch", this one is expertly made, with polish and style to spare.
It opens with a couple of teenage girls talking about a videotape that is making the rounds. It seems that when you finish watching it, the phone rings and a wispy voice tells you you'll die in seven days. It turns out one of the girls watched it. A week ago.
Screenwriter Ehren Kruger (whose name sounds like a horror movie character) and director Gore Verbinski (not much better) have drenched their tale in atmosphere, if not logic. Logic is treated here with the careless disregard of chastity in a sorority house; this story is about nightmare and shock and waking up screaming. Cinematographer Bojan Bazelli (the crew's nomenclature is scarier than the characters') has shot everything in pale, washed-out colors lit with an appliance bulb, and the visuals only get darker as the movie goes along. In retrospect you'll swear the whole thing was in black and white.
Crack investigative journalist Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts, in her first appearance since her great turn in "Mulholland Drive"), the aunt of the ill-fated teenager, determines to solve the mystery of why her niece died with her face twisted into a mask of terror that makes the picture of Dorian Gray look like a Hallmark card. In short order, Rachel tracks down the tape, and wouldn't you know, watches it. And the phone rings.
With just a week left on earth to figure things out, Rachel swings into action. She calls her friend Noah (Martin Henderson) and shows him the video (oops!), and his phone rings.....
The video, which Noah describes as "a bad student film", is in fact a creepily effective pastiche with serious debts to the Dali-Bunuel classic "Un Chien Andalou" and, I am told, a Nine Inch Nails music video. It is splattered with images that lead Rachel on a desperate hunt which brings her to an island, where things begin to come into focus, sort of, with the help of a couple of fine cameos from Brian Cox and Jane Alexander. But nothing ever really makes sense here, any more than a chaotically terrifying nightmare does without years of professional help.
Rachel has a son, Aidan (David Dorfman), a troubled little boy who ought to have been project enough for her without taking on the tale of the tape. Aidan is cut from the same pattern as Haley Joel Osment's "Sixth Sense" charmer, with big staring eyes and the preternatural stillness of an eighty-year-old on Prozac. Aidan doesn't see dead people, but he sees live people dead before the fact. Later on there's something about horses going crazy (and a tour-de-force scene aboard a ferry), and somebody observes that maybe horses know things before we do. Horses and little children. It's something to think about.
Verbinski keeps ratcheting up the tension, punctuating it with sudden scares that produce audible screams in the theater. But to his great credit, he manages without the buckets of blood and severed limbs that have passed for shock in recent generations of the genre. He weaves the story in and out of danger with that "She's okay...no she's not...yes she is...oh my god!" rhythm on which classic horror is built. He more than once gives us a recognizable "Boo!" set-up and then leaves us dangling without the payoff. Verbinski is more interested in the visceral grabber than he is in making sense, and there are one or two moments that aspire to a place in horror's pantheon of classic shockers, like the bathtub scene in "Diabolique". Whether or not they succeed, of course, is a matter of individual taste.
When you walk out of the theater, your state of mind will be governed to a large degree by the relative importance you give to atmospherics and to logic. If you're the hard-headed type who demands that things make sense, there will be an inevitable feeling of having been snookered. But if you just want to surrender to a good scare, this one delivers.
And too bad if you looked.
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
