The Long Week

The Ring
2002
Director: Gore Verbinski
Dreamworks Pictures

The ghost story is a central theme of Japanese horror films, spawning a wealth of creepy and atmospheric movies full of jump scares and tension. As with any foriegn cinematic trend that seems viable, Hollywood has come knocking, and many of these films have gotten the US remake treatment. Most have been plain awful (The Eye, Pulse), but this is the rare case of a remake that is superior to its original. The Ring is a slinky, creepy masterpiece.

Rachel Kellar is sent on a mission to discover what might have killed her teenage niece and driven her friend crazy. She traces her neices steps to a cabin in the woods, and a mysterious videotape that is rumored to kill you seven days after you watch it. She watches the tape too and begins a desperate race to find the source of the curse and stop it before it claims her or her eerily mature son, Aiden, and his father, her estranged boyfriend Noah, who have both watched the tape as well.

The story unfolds beautifully, layer after layer, making this more a detective story than a horror film. With carefully crafted tension and beautiful camerawork, director Gore Verbinski uses all the tricks in the Hitchcock handbook here, and more skillfully than most directors do. He also gives us the classic "Hitchcock blonde" with Naomi Watts, who plays Rachel as a workaholic, quasi-neglectful mother, whose obsesssions tend to overshadow everything else in her life. Watts is magnetic, and she is matched by Martin Henderson as Noah, and young David Dorfman as Aiden. Amber Tamblyn also shines in her brief role, telegraphing her growing terror to the audience. The film has a wonderful artiness, nowhere more evident than the cursed video itself, which plays like a David Lynch short. The shocks are excellent too, especially the bloated, distorted faces of the curse's victims, which are seen for seconds, but long enough to leave your heart racing.

The Ring has been lampooned, and even savaged by some critics, but it stands as one of the most effective horror films of the new millenium, setting a template which many have tried to copy, but few have been able to match.