Rent The Ring (2002)

Spoilers follow ... - The Ring review by NP

This American remake of the Japanese original exceeds expectations. A ‘troubled kid’ always sends alarm bells ringing – often they are written and portrayed in such a precocious way that invites deep irritation rather than sympathy. Despite plenty of opportunities to exhibit such behaviour, young David Dorfman as Aiden mainly manages to avoid this. His mother Rachel (Naomi Watts) is actually less sympathetic than he is. She is an abrasive character who is very difficult to warm to.

Luckily, ‘The Ring’ also resists being a ‘teen’ movie, despite opening with two adolescent girls talking about ‘this videotape … that kills people’. Before long, as coincidence would have it, one of the girls has succumbed to that very curse.

Overall, this is a good, spooky remake of the 1998 film. It cultivates its own unique brand of horror. Often shot in cold colours, much use is made of creeping water, blurred photographs and the everyday city portrayed as an oppressive, menacing environment. While the idea of videotapes is suddenly archaic, it actually gives the oncoming horror a nostalgic, creepy feeling that, for example, a Blu-Ray just wouldn’t provide. The ‘subliminal’ imagery on the tape is also a very sinister, abstract series of events. You don’t know what it all means, but it certainly doesn’t look cheerful.

Gore Verbinski’s direction is very effective, building up a level of tension from less than obvious means. Views of tower-blocks, rain-swept streets and boxed-in people leading desolate lives help create an isolated world. Hans Zimmer’s wonderful musical score also promotes the notion of seclusion, with echoing piano minimalism, notes like raindrops. The central idea of Rachael hearing about a videotape that kills people, and then watching the tape and inviting Aiden’s father Noah (Martin Henderson) to watch it too, takes a lot of justification in logical terms and questions her intelligence. I’m not happy with the lack of explanation of this. Does she do this deliberately? In horror, stupid people do stupid things.

The impenetrable images on the tape are shadowed throughout the film, providing a certain, slowly unravelling degree of clarity. And yet it isn’t until the troubled Samara (Daveigh Chase) is mentioned, an adopted girl with deadly psychic abilities, who seems in spirit, to be responsible for the doings of the curse, do Aiden’s ‘troubles’ become clearer - he has a kind of kinship with her.

The standout scene, the moment the whole film has been leading up to, is a true classic horror moment. It’s more spectacular than the scene in the original, but more or less retains the intimacy of Samara’s singular mission: she’s coming for you. First out of image of the well, then – blurred and the image fracturing – towards the television screen; then, impossibly through the screen and into reality. It’s a blisteringly good moment of pure horror.

Effective Ghost Story - The Ring review by GI

For an American remake of a celebrated Japanese horror film, itself based on a Japanese novel, this is remarkably good. With it's dark, gothic, washed out colour palette and an overriding sense of foreboding throughout this is a very unsettling horror film even though the studio made big cuts to reduce the trauma on audiences and to get a lower classification. Even so the originality of this ghost story with an extremely vengeful spirit and the mystery plot centred around a strange videotape makes this a very interesting film. Naomi Watts plays Rachel, an investigative reporter, who starts to enquire into the strange deaths of four teenagers, one of whom was her niece, and finds they are linked to a videocassette tape. Her investigation finds the tape on which there is a bizarre series of surreal and disturbing images and there's apparently a curse that anyone who sees it will die within seven days. When Rachel's young son, Aidan, sneaks a look and begins to have visions of a strange girl she is forced to get to the bottom of the mystery very quickly. There's some really eerie stuff going on here and the story rattles along at a wonderful pace. Veteran British actor Brian Cox pops up in a cameo, along with Jane Alexander. A very entertaining and thrilling horror film that is well worth checking out if you've never seen it, and for those not normally into horror this is something quite different and one to try. I would love to see the original cut which apparently has Chris Cooper in a bookending cameo. Who knows perhaps one day it will get a release?