The
Ring, directed by Gore Verbinski, is a remake
of Hideo Nakata's Ringu (1998),
in turn based on a novel by Koji Suzuki. The film pushes the
envelope from the "I see dead people" theme of The
Sixth Sense (1999) into The
Blair Witch Project (1999) mystery. When
the film begins, Katie (played by Amber Tamblyn), the best
friend of Rachel Keller (played by Naomi Watts), indicates
that she and three friends went to a mountain cabin for the
weekend, found and viewed a strange videotape, whereupon the
telephone rang, and a voice predicted that those who watched
would die in exactly seven days. As foretold, Katie and her
companions die at the same time, exactly one week after viewing
the tape. Meanwhile, six-year-old Aidan (played by David Dorfman),
Rachel's son, has been producing odd drawings at school, and
his teacher (played by Sandra Thigpen) raises the matter with
her. Never having seen the tape, Aidan is drawing clues that
will later be used to solve the mystery. Rachel is a reporter
for a Seattle newspaper. Accustomed as she is to investigating
news stories, she goes to the cabin, gets the tape, plays
the tape through, and receives the telephone call. Rather
than panicking, though she realizes that her son has telepathically
picked up clues relating to the tape, she decides that the
tape provides a mystery for her to solve. With the aid of
her boyfriend Noah (played by Martin Henderson), she searches
for newspaper clippings that point to strange events of the
Morgan family, who live on an island in Puget Sound. Richard
Morgan (played by Brian Cox) is the sole survivor of a stampede
by wild horses that killed his wife; his daughter Samara (played
by Daveigh Chase) is also dead. When she goes to the island
to importune Morgan, he is evasive and ultimately commits
suicide. When Noah arrives to assist her, they match up more
parts of the Morgan residence with clues in the tape and from
Aidan's drawings. Rachel and Noah then go back to the cabin,
where they tear up the floorboards and find a well under the
cabin. Rachel falls into the well, where she finds Samara's
dead body at the bottom. When Rachel raises the body to the
surface, Samara's face immediately turns into a skull. Soon,
the film becomes calm, having seemingly put Samara to rest.
Filmviewers then may look at their watches, expecting credits
to roll so that they can go home on an upbeat note. For the
next twenty minutes, however, an even more surreal ending
awaits those who may have been disappointed that thus far
they had nothing to scream about. The Japanese film had a
sequel, and The Ring calls for one,
so the mysteries at the end may be solved in The
Ring 2. As in the case of most horror movies,
the effect of the pre-Hallowe'en release of The
Ring is to enable filmviewers to find something
more frightening than their quotidian problems, whether terminal
cancer, the end stage of AIDS, forced unemployment, or nightly
gunfire preventing residents in a neighborhood from an uninterrupted
sleep. MH
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