The Ring (2002)
Directed by Gore Verbinski
Journalist Rachel Keller investigates a strange videotape that may be behind the untimely deaths of four teenagers. There is an urban legend about this tape: the viewer will die seven days after watching it. Rachel tracks down the video... and watches it. Now she has just seven days to unravel the mystery of the Ring in order to save herself and her son.
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Director Gore Verbinski establishes a nice, moody setting, making a few quiet nods towards The Shining and concentrating on the overall theme rather than sudden jolts or roller-coaster thrills.
This Westernized, subtitle-free version comprises a pastiche of horror hooks, from pretty, petrified teens (lifted from any slasher epic or Don't Say a Word) to the standard creepy moppet (via The Shining and The Sixth Sense) to boob-tube bogeys (à la Videodrome and Poltergeist) to some good ol' family fun akin to that of V.C. Andrews (Flowers in the Attic).
There is the well from "The Amityville Horror," spooky telepathic kids from "The Shining" and deafening television snow from "Poltergeist," not to mention an apartment building homage to "Rear Window."
I wish that Verbinski had further explored the images supplied by the screenplay; he might have come up with something metaphysical in the mystery of the tape, resembling the patterns in Bergman's hotel in The Silence or Kubrick's in The Shining.
Likewise, the young actor playing her son (David Dorfman) is extremely effective and though his preternatural ability to see things he really shouldn't be able to is perhaps too reminiscent of Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense, he is nonetheless a suitably creepy addition to the story.
This Westernized, subtitle-free version comprises a pastiche of horror hooks, from pretty, petrified teens (lifted from any slasher epic or Don't Say a Word) to the standard creepy moppet (via The Shining and The Sixth Sense) to boob-tube bogeys (à la Videodrome and Poltergeist) to some good ol' family fun akin to that of V.C. Andrews (Flowers in the Attic).
Verbinski didn't need to steal imagery from any other movie than the one he was remaking, but nonetheless references to films such as "The Sixth Sense" and "Psycho" serve only to distance the audience.
One is reminded of "The Sixth Sense" and "The Others," particularly in the sense that, like those films, "The Ring" always seems to have more on its mind than its surface-level ghost story.
It’s a slippery, murky, gray-green film, full of borrowings from “Twin Peaks,” “The Sixth Sense,” “Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Poltergeist” and who knows what-all else.
In her race against time to solve the mystery behind "The Ring" (and please don't expect me to specify what 'The Ring' actually is), Rachel enlists the help of not only her longtime friend and colleague Noah (Martin Henderson), but also her young son Aidan (David Dorfman), who, like the Hayley Joel Osment role in "The Sixth Sense" and the little girl in "Stir of Echoes," seems to have a gift for communicating with those in a different plane of existence, although he really doesn't want anyone to think so.
Indeed, the mystery of the film and the mystery of the tape provide a double-barreled denouement in one of the most intensely disturbing scenes of recent memory, echoing such notable moments in horror history as David Cronenberg's Videodrome, the "Pigeons from Hell" episode of Thriller and the "Drop of Water" segment of Mario Bava's Black Sabbath, while offering something fresh at the same time.
This Westernized, subtitle-free version comprises a pastiche of horror hooks, from pretty, petrified teens (lifted from any slasher epic or Don't Say a Word) to the standard creepy moppet (via The Shining and The Sixth Sense) to boob-tube bogeys (à la Videodrome and Poltergeist) to some good ol' family fun akin to that of V.C. Andrews (Flowers in the Attic).
While "The Ring" is a contextual dead ringer for the recent "FearDotCom" (sub the video with a Web site), the movie it most resembles in spirit is David Cronenberg's far superior "Videodrome," about a late-night TV program that infects the minds of its viewers.
But if you stick around until the final reel, you will get a nice jolt from an effect stolen from David Cronenberg's demented 1981 epic "Videodrome."
As in David Cronenberg's Videodrome, it involves a television image made flesh.
In fact, not since "Poltergeist" and "Videodrome" has a film made our faithful family room companion so creepy.
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The movie is perfectly creepy in the best possible sense, director Verbinski taking his cue largely from Hitchcock and "Psycho."
Verbinski didn't need to steal imagery from any other movie than the one he was remaking, but nonetheless references to films such as "The Sixth Sense" and "Psycho" serve only to distance the audience.
If you don't go in expecting The Exorcist or Psycho you won't be disappointed.
What I can talk about is the fact that “The Ring” incorporates the language of film surrealism more convincingly than any horror film I can think of since “Night of the Living Dead,” “Carnival of Souls” and “Psycho.”
And the movie owes obvious debts to The Others, The Blair Witch Project, even Rear Window.
This is Rear Window territory, which most pop films mistake for simple voyeaurism, but The Ring, though altered some from its Japanese source, has more on its mind.
There is the well from "The Amityville Horror," spooky telepathic kids from "The Shining" and deafening television snow from "Poltergeist," not to mention an apartment building homage to "Rear Window."
One particularly remarkable exterior evokes the anomie of the film’s video age citizens though Verbinski kills the mood with a cheap Rear Window reference.
He gives us an effective opening scene, which is itself an homage to "Scream" that the rest of the film never matches.
Then again, if The Ring‘s this-is-how-an-urban-legend-was-made intro isn’t any indication, the events depicted here have been seemingly manufactured for the Scream generation.
"The Ring" was directed by Gore Verbinski ("The Mexican"), and he's clearly studied not only Alfred Hitchcock's work but also the "Scream" series as well.
Kruger's script begins almost like another version of the "Scream" series, with two girls exchanging scary stories.
It's the first time I've seen this tactic used since Poltergeist (1982), which left us relaxing for a few moments -- JoBeth Williams even nods off in the bathtub -- believing the horror was over, before... BANG!
Verbinski's ideas on secularism and storytelling are not as clear or well-developed as they should be, like he's trying to marry Bergman's despair of faith with Spielberg's Poltergeist crisis of faith.
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Some of the material also borrows from the superb George C. Scott supernatural thriller, "The Changeling" (I won't explain how, but after you see the film, you'll see the similarities in some pivotal discoveries and revelations).
The killer videotape itself is an almost indescribable non-narrative montage in grainy black-and-white — a woman in a mirror, a man at a window, a ladder against a wall, a centipede crawling from beneath a table and “the ring,” a circle of light resembling the corona of a solar eclipse — that strongly suggests such key surrealist works as Maya Deren’s “Meshes in the Afternoon” or Luis Buñuel’s collaboration with Dalí, “Un chien andalou.”