Flak Magazine: Review of The Ring, 10-22-02

Two girls, home alone, bored by what's on TV, begin ruminating about a creepy new urban legend: There were these kids that watched a mysterious videotape and then got a phone call saying they would die in seven days. One of the girls says she's seen the tape — seven days ago! — and, as a prank, pretends to choke … but then the phone rings, and she goes white as a sheet.

It's one of the smartest moments of The Ring, the tale of a reporter who watches the tape and the seven freaky days that follow. The surprise is that the movie is a successful stab at outside-the-box horror from a major Hollywood studio, but that surprise is mediated by the unsurprising fact that the movie is a remake of a foreign film; namely, Hideo Nakata's much-loved 1998 Japanese chiller Ring. The scene featuring the two girls is the first in both movies, cleverly setting up not only the confluence of timeworn oral storytelling and modern technology that defines the films but also the pattern of involuted feints, desperate skepticism and genuine chills that each film will generate along the way.

The Ring's next scene establishes the other half of the movie's concerns: Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts), a hardworking reporter/single mom, is late to pick her son Aidan (David Dorfman) from school one day and is lightly chastised by Aidan's teacher for not working harder to communicate with her somewhat withdrawn, Haley-Joel-Osmenty (in more ways than one) son. To reveal much more of what's at play here would be unfair, but suffice it to say that Rachel and Aidan are not the first family unit to have to deal with this kind of closed-offedness, and that the more deeply something is buried, the more forcefully it'll bubble up.

This second theme is worth mentioning because the filmmakers treat it with as much respect as the for-scares theme, much to the benefit of the movie. While there is little in the careers of Dreamworks house director Gore Verbinski (Mouse Hunt, The Mexican) and screenwriter Ehren Kruger (Arlington Road, Reindeer Games) to suggest that they had a horror movie this effective and this well-rounded in them, each brings some highly polished craft to the table and makes a noteworthy, career-high showing.

But in allotting praise, it can be hard to separate their good work from the original's genius concept: the urban-legend underpinnings; the jarring, semi-abstract nature of the tape itself; the way that many mainstay gadgets, including cameras and telephones, become tainted by the tape's curse; the basic idea of who created the tape, and why — these compelling aspects are executed mostly par excellence by Verbinski and Kruger, but you may react less to the execution and more to the outré ideas behind them. That said, however, it's entirely possible that The Ring is better — scarier — for being a remake. The American version gains something when you know that this story has been told before, the-same-but-differently, by another culture. The Ring is a horror movie in which the chainsaw has been replaced with a meme, and for a second interpretation to, in folktale fashion, pop up with its own permutations makes it a whole extra dimension of creepy. But The Ring is not in fact the second interpretation; Nakata's Ring followed a Japanese TV movie version and has already been remade in Korea, and at the heart of all these interpretations is the original novel by Koji Suzuki. If all these variations were slavishly faithful to the novel, there'd be little to say; it's the fact that they're so different that gives them this delectable dimension of cultural potency.

For instance: While a lot of The Ring's scenes, scares and even chunks of dialogue have essentially been transliterated from Nakata's film, the characters themselves have been translated — not just substituted from one story to another, but altered to fit into the right idiom. Rachel is drawn the most broadly, and so it's perhaps difficult to see where she most differs from Ring's intrepid reporter, but in the more peripheral players you can see how they were changed by their immigration — the characters played (superbly) by Martin Henderson, Brian Cox and Daveigh Chase fill the same story needs as their Japanese doppelgangers, but in both films each character is very much of its culture, reflecting, in The Ring's case, very American ideas about family, maternity, masculinity and childhood.

Or consider the different significances each film attaches to water: According to J. Lopez's frighteningly exhaustive website devoted to all things Ring, the novel features an evil spirit who lives in a statue in the ocean that might have a very significant role in the story. In Nakata's film, there's no reference to an evil spirit, but the sea motif gets recycled into some creepy children's verse and a lot of Michael Mann-esque coastal shots of vast oceans. Verbinski and Kruger abstract this element even further, with water basically becoming an ectoplasm-like indicator of supernatural activity in many scenes, and when this motif is ultimately revealed to have roots in the narrative, it's in a totally different way than in the novel.

But you don't have to have seen one of the other Rings to sample the pastiche flavor of Verbinski's film. Reasonable connections (if not necessarily influences) could be intuited between The Ring and the extrasensory kids and beleaguered parents of The Sixth Sense and The Shining, or the ghost-in-the-machine of The Mothman Prophecies, or the urban-legend Sturm und Drang of The Blair Witch Project, or the meditation on reality vs. video of Blair Witch 2, or the supernatural parental anxiety of The Others, or any number of connections with Videodrome, Scream, the "It's a Good Life" episode from "The Twilight Zone" and many more. Like the previous incarnations of The Ring, seeing these subliminal references to other horror touchstones (well, OK, Blair Witch 2 is not a horror touchstone) only adds to the psychic weight of the film, turning it into a kind of scare-movie echo chamber. In another film, such sampling could be off-putting, but here, when what's supposed to make us jump is the accretion of a terrifying movie into our culture, it's precious stuff. And the filmmakers know how to play with it; once the movie informs us just which class of monster it's about, the film moves like an arrow to the conclusion conventionally prescribed for such stories … but then it subverts this idea, to great effect.

It's when the movie gets this compelling (at least in comparison to its peers) that you're happy to forgive it its missteps: It can be literal-minded to the point of tedium, but there's still enough ambiguity to relish that you get over it; its special effects misfire as often as they hit their mark, but it's not as distressingly overdone as Dreamworks' other horror remake. Mostly, The Ring works very well, and it brings some unique scares to the multiplexes.

Except it's not really so unique. For the past 10 or so years, while no one was looking, Japan has been exporting some of the world's best horror films. Well, "exporting" is a hopeful term, since few of these films have made it to our shores, but directors like Nakata, Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Pulse) and Takashi Miike (Audition) have set a high standard for millennial horror at the movies. The theoretical domestic demand for Ring to be created by the success of its remake will likely make Verbinski's film the most significant ambassador of that movement yet; if it opens the doors for those films to permeate and freak out our culture, then The Ring will come true in a whole new way.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)