Written by: Ehren Kruger (screenplay), Kôji Suzuki (novel)
Directed by: Gore Verbinski
Starring: Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, and David Dorfman
Reviewed by: Brett Gallman (@brettgallman)
"Seven days..."
True horror translates. It knows no boundaries, be it language or cultural. There’s a reason many of our most successful, resonant horror franchises thrive on the simplicity of universal terror: we all are capable of taking trips that go horribly awry; we all sleep, camp, and celebrate Halloween; most of us have encountered stories about some boogeyman or another.
Likewise, we’ve all watched videotapes (or at least we had closer towards the turn of the century) and indulged campfire tales or urban legends—this, more than anything, explains the runaway success of both Ringu and its American remake The Ring. Both thrive on an irresistible hook: what if there was a videotape so evil that it could literally kill you? It’s the allure of watching a forbidden tape magnified to the logical extreme, and it’s no wonder Paramount and Dreamworks were so eager to give Hideo Nakata’s film an American makeover. As far as premises go, this one is difficult to botch.
Of course, it’s also notable that they didn’t simply coast on the premise and were committed to producing a damn fine rendition of it. Memories of what the J-horror remake wave would become sometimes make it difficult to remember that The Ring mostly works because it so deftly couches its dramatic elements in its horror beats: where later films would thrive on an assortment of frightful gags and unreal imagery at the expense of story, The Ring effectively balances both: it’s creepy, tense, and gut-wrenching in equal measure. What screenwriter Ehren Kruger and director Gore Verbinski did was rightfully take a solid foundation and embellish upon it ever so slightly, and the result is one of the best American horror films of this century so far.
While it wasn’t exactly unheard of during this time (look no further than The Sixth Sense a few years earlier), it’s still noteworthy that The Ring just felt like a big deal, thanks in large part to Naomi Watts taking the lead. Just a year removed from her critically acclaimed breakthrough role in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, she lent an immediate presence and gravitas to the role of Rachel Keller, a Seattle reporter investigating the bizarre death of her niece Katie (Amber Tamblyn). Her friends insist that she died after watching a mysterious videotape while on a weekend trip with her boyfriend. Oddly enough, he also died—around the same time as Katie to boot. Upon further investigation, it turns out that two other students on the trip also died in a car accident, a revelation that further piques Rachel’s curiosity about this preposterous story.
Viewers don't find it difficult to believe at all. In a masterfully tense prologue, the audience is privy to Katie’s last, agonizing moments of life. It begins innocently enough, with her chatting away with a friend about her forbidden trip with her secret boyfriend. Even when the topic of the tape is broached, it’s dismissed as harmless nonsense. Katie even goes so far as to fake her own death as the fatal hour approaches—and then the phone rings. Verbinski playfully leads up to the punchline by faking out both Katie and the audience, letting them off the hook with a sense of relief just long enough before introducing the ghastly, deadly truth: the urban legend is very real, as evidenced by the spooky image that inexplicably haunts Katie’s television just before she dies.
But Verbinksi doesn’t completely give up the ghost; instead, he basically dangles it like a carrot before the audience, who are strung alongside Rachel on her quest to uncover the grisly truth. It’s fair to say that much of The Ring’s effectiveness thrives on the source material, and Verbinski’s adaptation retains its page-turning intrigue. He and Kruger also have a sense for pacing to be sure, but author Koji Suzuki and original Ringu screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi laid should be commended for laying a fine groundwork. Even after all these years, The Ring moves with a potent sense of urgency, spurred on by the fact that Rachel herself only has seven days to uncover the tape’s mystery after watching it herself. When bother her young son (David Dorfman) and ex-lover (Martin Henderson) view the tape, the urgency is only compounded, spurring her to uncover the sordid backstory even more feverishly.
Unfortunately, the cryptic nature of this otherworld transmission sends Rachel prowling through the labyrinthine history involving the Morgans, a local family who endured a tragedy some years earlier. Verbinski’s unravelling of this sordid tale is essentially the film’s prologue write large: just as that prelude playfully slinked through its beats, so too does the Morgans’ backstory send the audience on an exciting rollercoaster ride. Somehow, even mundane stuff like Rachel trawling through old newspaper clippings and footage is positively thrilling, and business only picks up once she encounters Richard (Brian Cox), the surviving patriarch of the Morgan clan. It’s at this point the script deftly sets its twisting, turning climax into motion: it has you looking in one obvious direction (like Rachel, the audience is absolutely convinced Richard murdered his own daughter, Samara) before pulling the rug from beneath you multiple times.
In this respect, I’m not sure The Ring gets enough credit for being so goddamn fun. Once its wheels are greased, the last half hour or so are wickedly entertaining, full of twists, turns, and one particularly awesome fake out that allows the film to linger on for one last, particularly cruel revelation. Forged from all this is one of the horror icon’s most recent icons in Samara, the Morgans’ 12-year-old daughter. Born under mysterious circumstances, Samara is unnaturally creepy in her sparse appearances, and few explanations are offered for the bizarre events surrounding her. Samara herself can only dryly insist that she does want to hurt people, though she does half-heartedly claim she’s sorry for it. Sometimes, pure evil wears the face of a devious little shit that’s committed to spreading misery from beyond the grave, even if it entails manipulating a desperate mother into doing her dirty work.
Of course, her most infamous legacy is the tape itself, an unholy dispatch from beyond. While much of the imagery is repurposed from the original Ringu, Verbinski makes it his own, and I find it to be a little more oppressively sinister than Nakata’s slightly more ethereal take. It’s an unnerving collection of imagery that would be among the most effective horror shorts even outside of its context in The Ring. Within it, becomes something of a puzzle left to be decoded, the twisted key to unlocking Samara’s gruesome fate at the bottom of a well. Paradoxically, it also ensures that her end is only her beginning, a closed loop that will perpetuate forever so long as the tape circulates.
Samara’s tape is also a microcosm of The Ring itself: a template that’s been just slightly embellished into something familiar but fresh. I don’t want to discount Verbinski’s fine helming here: far from a simple copy and paste job, he magnifies Ringu’s melancholy vibe into a suffocatingly somber, rain-soaked affair. For all its thrilling narrative meanderings, The Ring is also unnerving because Verbinski casts just enough of a pall over the proceedings. His restrained scares are expertly couched and spring organically from the story, be it an eerie episode involving a spooked horse or Richard Morgan’s outrageously grisly suicide. There’s not a gratuitous frame in The Ring: every story revelation, every grotesquely distorted face works towards that stunning moment when Samara emerges from the television to claim her final victim here.
This final turn of events further resonates because of the strong character work. Watts is obviously the film’s empathetic center as Rachel, whose desperation and determination fuel much of the film’s urgency. She’s an authentic mess, a mother who knows she hasn’t exactly been there for her son, and Verbinski shows admirable restraint when exploring their relationship. The Ring doesn’t lean on cloying, obvious displays, and Dorfman is just the right mixture of precocious and weird—you sense that a lesser director would have wrung this whole subplot for maximum, phony sentiment. Verbinski rightfully keeps the drama grounded and genuine, even as it pertains to the bad blood between Rachel and her ex, as Henderson’s performance remains muted and aloof. These are all simply good people caught in an inexplicable feedback loop of tragedy—which is exactly why the ending of The Ring is such an effective gut punch.
There’s a tendency for landmark films to sometimes be caught in their own wake. For example, the conversation surrounding Scream often circles around to the films it inspired, that wave of slick, studio slashers starring marketable names and faces. Likewise, The Ring is inseparable from the J-Horror remake boom it initiated, even if it is leagues above all of the films that followed (including its own sequel). I can’t help but wonder if The Ring has been underappreciated because this particular wave was so underwhelming as a whole—for the most part, this rash of ghost movies (many of which carried the dreaded PG-13 rating, not that it’s any indicator of quality) is a forgettable lot that hasn’t aged very well.
If anything, this only makes The Ring all the more special, and I will certainly never forget attending a secret advanced screening for it about a week ahead of its actual release, a strategy that no doubt contributed to the film’s huge word-of-mouth success. While no one could have known it would essentially kick off a new era in horror, there was something undeniably fresh and exciting about The Ring at the time (well, at least for those of us who hadn’t seen Ringu, which wouldn’t be released in the States until 2003).
Even now, it stands as a stark reminder that the best ghost stories don’t have to rely exclusively on cheap jolts and loud noises to be effective. Something even more basic—yet paradoxically more difficult to craft—is more essential: a clever hook, some genuine dread, and strong character work go much further. Of course, an iconic gag where a ghost girl crawls out of a TV like an unholy demonic spider helps too.
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