This is what you see before you die: The ocean surf lapping against the waterlogged carcass of a horse. A chair spinning upside down. A woman in black jumping off a windswept cliff. A glowing ring.
These images, couched in the blue-gray hues of the video age, feature on a tape that kills its viewers in Gore Verbinski’s The Ring. This relatively brief video segment is unforgivingly oblique in its refusal to cohere, making it the most disturbing part of the movie. It is at the film’s core, extending a cloud of oppression over its entirety.
The Ring is adapted from Ringu, a 1998 Japanese feature that became its nation’s highest grossing horror film ever. In Ringu, a journalist investigates the death of her cousin, who mysteriously croaked seven days after watching an allegedly cursed videotape. As journalists are known to do, she gets nosy, watches the video and sets into play the week-long deadline to death that impels her to find out the tape’s origin. The answer is unsurprisingly supernatural.
Ringu begins, as these things do, with an urban legend?a cursed video that kills whoever watches it. The rationale behind this tall tale resembles that of the horror genre itself. “Stories like that don’t start with anyone,” says one of the protagonists. “People feel anxious and then rumors begin.” The anxiety of the unknown feeds directly into horror films and their legitimacy is often derived from their blatant subtexts. Here, it is the fear of technology: cursed videotapes and disagreeable television sets. The images on the tape are shot with a haloid tinge, like a security video that has caught the one thing it absolutely was not supposed to.
Ringu straddles the line between suspense and horror; it is primarily the former with strong touches of the latter. But the film suffers from its narrative of discovery?the characters must reveal the story behind the tape if they are to live. The high points are those where the truth is unearthed, where pieces are added to the puzzle, not the actual horror. The truly frightening moments in Ringu are distantly spaced out and the supposedly somber specter of death is weakened by the movie’s sunny skies.
The American Ring is weighed down by the same structural deficiences as the film’s detective factor takes over. Scenes abound of journalist Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) doing research in dusty newspaper archives or among the bleary monitors of a video bank. In stupendously annoying fashion, the characters insist on reading out loud everything that is seen on screen, working to drill the intricacies of the story into our heads when they should be sending chills down our spines. Again, where it should scare, The Ring informs. It effectively leaches the plot of its fear factor the more we learn about the tape. The film is pregnant with the possibility of revelation as suspense replaces fright. But Verbinski plays this game well, which one would not expect from his previous outings (Mouse Hunt, The Mexican). He constructs several nods to Hitchcock films?Rear Window, Psycho, Sabotage?that announce his intentions to create a world of paranoia and unease. The film delves into the paranormal as Hitchcock never would have, while maintaining a strong, pessimistic sense of the human soul.
In its construction of mood and its explanation of the tape’s origin, The Ring surpasses its Japanese template. Set in Seattle, the movie is relentlessly damp and the sun never seems to break through into the character’s lives. A threat of menace is present in even the most trivial scenes, and as a result, a crushing sense of dread attaches itself to every frame. Where the former film pins itself around the idea of self-perpetuating supernatural evil, The Ring locates that wickedness in us, with nothing more malevolent than man, making the film considerably darker than its Japanese source. In the vein of all the best horror films, it allows us to venture close to the light of reconciliation before spitefully snatching it away. The world of The Ring, with its cryptic images and cycle of death, snakes its way into our good dreams and turns them into nightmares.
