The Ring (2002)
With visually awe-inspiring cinematography, a soothingly riveting musical score, and a pair of compelling lead performances from Naomi Watts and Martin Henderson, Gore Verbinski's English-language remake of Hideo Nakata's 1998 Japanese supernatural horror film, Ring, itself an adaptation of the 1991 novel of the same name by Koji Suzuki, is a quiet, somber, patiently crafted, and aesthetically resplendent ghost story that relies on absorbing atmosphere, nerve-shredding visuals, and intelligent dialogue over graphic displays of violence or numerous ghostly confrontations, paving the way for an influx of American remakes of Asian and Japanese horror films in the process.
Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) is a single mother who lives in a high-rise apartment in Seattle, Washington with her preteen son, Aidan (David Dorfman), and works full-time as a journalist at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. At the funeral of her 16-year-old niece, Katie Embry (Amber Tamblyn), she's requested by her grieving older sister, Ruthie (Lindsay Frost), to investigate the sudden and unexplainable death of her daughter, who allegedly suffered a heart attack four nights earlier while having a sleepover with her best friend, Becca Kotler (Rachael Bella). While sneakily inserting herself into the private business of some of Katie's friends to extract any information she can, such as whether she might have been taking drugs, Rachel learns from a mysterious, sullen teenager named Kellan (Adam Brody) that the cause of Katie's death was a VHS tape. According to something of a local legend, featured on this tape is a gallery of horrifying images, leading to a ghostly woman who emerges from the viewer's TV screen and kills them within seven days of having viewed it. As she conducts more research into the supposed hoax, Rachel discovers that Katie's boyfriend and two of their friends also died on the same night and at the exact same time as Katie. Traveling to a motel cabin called Shelter Mountain Inn, Rachel comes across the unmarked video tape and watches it in the same cabin rented by Katie and her friends, the same spot where they watched it. Afterward, she received a phone call in which a childlike voice on the opposite end whispers, "Seven days."
Fully convinced that she's now marked for death, Rachel enlists the aid of her ex-boyfriend and Aidan's father, Noah Clay (Martin Henderson), a knowledgeable video analyst, who watches the video and initially thinks little of it, supportive of Rachel's work but chalking her superstition up to tiredness. That is until he comes to the realization that he too is now under the deadly curse, at which point he agrees to follow his ex's advice to "grow up" and get to the bottom of who made this bizarre tape, where it came from, and how they may go about saving not only their lives, but the most important one: that of their son, who makes the mistake of watching it himself one night after struggling to fall asleep.
In the case of many horror movies revolving around urban legends, the protagonists are more often than not teenagers. How refreshing, then, that the protagonists in The Ring are an ambitious, hard-working single mother struggling to make a living for herself and her young child, and her video-geek ex-boyfriend who grows into the dedicated partner and loving father he failed to be the first time around. Ehren Kruger, the screenwriter with no relation whatsoever to the nightmare-invading, blade-fingered apparition from A Nightmare on Elm Street (he spells his last name with an "e" between the "u" and "g"), uses the simple concept of Suzuki's novel -- that of a video tape killing its viewers within a week -- to explore complex themes about motherhood: the guilt of a single mother prioritizing her job over the nurture of her child, the desire to conceive when the body is infertile, the fear of failing her child, and the desperate lengths a mother will go to protect them from the cold, merciless hand of death.
One night, during a sobering conversation between Rachel and Aidan about the unpredictability of death and ephemerality of life, Aidan asserts, "We don't have enough time." Instantly, Rachel's assumption goes to the excessive amount of time she spends working for the P-I. "Oh, honey, I know I've been working a lot, and I'm sorry, but I promise I'm gonna make it up to you." For Rachel, her office is like a second home, and her chase for the next big story fuels her each day. As a result, she leaves Aidan in the care of either a babysitter or her sister, failing to acknowledge the toll that takes on her son, who has learned to take care of himself and is grappling with the recent passing of his cousin, with whom he shared a close relationship, without an outlet to express his feelings. Because his mother isn't home a lot of the time, Aidan has no one to talk to and open up about his innermost feelings, necessitating him to purge them in the red flag-raising form of vividly inappropriate drawings of dead bodies. "Has he talked to you about [Katie's] death?" asks his day care teacher after Rachel arrives late to pick him up. "Well, like you said, he's not the talkative type," she perfunctorily replies. "That doesn't mean he has nothing to say," the teacher wisely retorts, eliciting an attitude of defensiveness from Rachel, who knows exactly what she's implying.
The opening scene of The Ring immediately sets the quiet, nightmarish tone for the rest of the movie to follow, fulfilling the dual goal of establishing the legend of the cursed video tape and proving the impetus for the protagonists' investigation into the world of the surreal. Before the screen brightens to unveil the first frame, director Verbinski serenades our ears with the peaceful pitter-patter of raindrops. Opening with an establishing shot of a large, brown house being pummeled with rain in the nighttime, a pair of teenage girls named Katie and Becca, dressed in conservative schoolgirl uniforms, are in the former's bedroom listlessly channel-surfing on a TV. Katie philosophizes about the toxic effect TV-watching has on the brain. "You know, I heard there's so many magnetic waves traveling through the air because of TV and telephones that we're losing, like, ten times as many brain cells as we're supposed to. Like, all the molecules in our heads are all unstable. All the companies know about it, but they're not doing anything about it. It's, like, a big conspiracy." Suddenly, after Katie turns off the TV, the somnambulant Becca springs to life as she relays the story of "this video tape that kills you when you watch it" with ghoulish relish. "You start to play it, and it's like somebody's nightmare. Then suddenly, this woman comes on, smiling at you, right? Seeing you through the screen. And as soon as it's over, your phone rings. Someone knows you've watched it. And what they say is, 'You will die in seven days.' And exactly seven days later..." The mood shifts from the innocent, spooky fun of a campfire tale when Katie realizes she's watched this exact tape. Last weekend, she was with her boyfriend, Josh, and two of his friends at a woodsy cabin they rented in the mountains. While trying to record a football game, the quartet were met instead with "something else" on the screen, followed by a threatening phone call. To her horror, that event transpired one week ago tonight. Becca laughs off this story, accusing Katie of just trying to scare her, when Katie begins choking, grasping her throat, collapsing into a freaked-out Becca's lap. Then, with a smug, "gotcha" smile, Katie bursts out laughing, revealing her spontaneous spell of suffocation to be a joke, even though her story isn't. The phone rings, causing Katie to revert to a state of heart-stopping panic, which signals to Becca that there "really is a tape."
After hanging up, Katie gets ready to take a sip, when suddenly the TV in the living room turns on by itself, hissing with static. Thinking Becca is playing another prank on her, Katie demands the remote, only to find it in plain sight on the sofa. She turns off the television and heads back to the kitchen, and it turns on again. Her fear ratcheting upward, Katie rushes to the TV and pulls the plug. In the reflection of the screen, a figure whooshes across the kitchen. Katie gasps and spins around, seeing nothing there. As she returns to the kitchen, the refrigerator door slowly opens on its own. Katie rushes to slam the door shut, hyperventilating. At the bottom of the stairs, she calls out to Becca, who offers no response. In addition to domestic materials, Verbinski finds a way to create haunting images out of basic camera angles and placements, with Bazelli using a low-angle shot to film Tamblyn's feet running up the steps. When Katie reaches the top, Bazelli sets the camera at ground level in front of the bedroom door, a puddle of water seeping through the bottom crack. Katie walks slowly toward the door, enough to precisely convey trepidation without dragging. Editor Craig Wood cuts between close-ups of Tamblyn's anxious face and of her hand slowly reaching for the dripping knob. Taking a deep breath, Katie pushes the door open, determined to face her fear, only to realize too late how warranted it was. On the opposite end, the TV is now on, displaying a static shot of a well located in the middle of a field. Accompanied by a piercing screech, Bazelli zooms his camera quickly from the TV screen and onto Katie, whose once-beautiful face, in the process of contorting into a silent scream, almost imperceptibly rots before our eyes into a sickly-green mummification.
This cold open is a masterpiece of horror in and of itself, making use of basic ingredients -- two teenagers alone in a house on a rainy night, one of them isolated and terrorized by an unseen supernatural presence -- to evoke the irrational, atmospheric paranoia of a nightmare. But the amplified sound effects, moody color palette, and classic setting would have fallen flat were it not for the brilliant role commitment exhibited by Tamblyn, who, after Barrymore, delivers the second greatest performance by an actor in the opening of a horror movie.
When casting the role of Rachel Keller, Verbinski admitted to not wanting to cast "big stars," as he wanted his film to be "discovered." Consequently, several high-profile actresses initially considered -- including Jennifer Connelly, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kate Beckinsale -- went ultimately uncast. Of those four, three have since been given the opportunity to showcase their chops in horror: Connelly landed the starring role in Dark Water, another American remake of a Japanese horror film; Hewitt had already achieved fame as the protagonist of I Know What You Did Last Summer and its even-worse sequel, the aptly named I Still Know What You Did Last Summer; and Beckinsale co-starred in Vacancy, alongside Luke Wilson. Naomi Watts, fresh off the success of her breakthrough role in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, solidifies herself in The Ring as the queen of horror remakes, delivering a passionate, beautifully modulated performance of maternal devotion and journalistic ferocity. In his review for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the same newspaper for which Rachel writes, William Arnold postulates that Rachel projects intelligence, resourcefulness, and determination, three qualities I certainly wouldn't dream to disagree with.
In terms of her dedication to her job as an unrelenting truth-seeker, Rachel shares similarities with Clarice Starling from The Silence of the Lambs. However, Watts plays her as an affectionate, supportive mother first and a hardworking career woman second. Driven by a moral obligation to her heartbroken sister, who pleads with her to ask questions to find out what happened to Katie, Watts throws herself into the investigation with ferocious tenacity, determined to get at the truth no matter how devious the methods she's willing to employ may be. When she approaches two young women at Katie's funeral, Watts turns on the youthful charisma, casually inserting herself into their conversation to obtain private details about Becca's commitment to a mental hospital, inquiring about whether she and Katie were taking drugs the night Katie died. After one girl snickers and turns her back on her, Rachel brazenly snatches her cigarette from her hand to light up her own, earning their trust with an admission that, when she was their age, she and her girlfriend used to sneak up to her bedroom and get high. After the proprietor of the Shelter Mountain Inn temporarily leaves his post, Rachel steals the unmarked VHS tape situated on the shelf and stashes it in her satchel just before he returns. At first, this is just a job like any other, if a tad more strange and hoax-like. Rachel has been sent on a mission to uncover the source of a mystery, and she feels no qualms about engaging in some traveling, deception, and "borrowing" to accomplish that. However, after she watches the tape, she quickly realizes she's marked herself as the latest victim and flies into action.
Rachel isn't the type of protagonist who takes an excruciatingly long time to realize the otherworldly danger she's put herself in. She's smart and open-minded enough to believe in it right away, confirmed by the life-threatening phone call she receives after her first viewing of the tape. Whether speaking to a loved one or aiming to withdraw relevant details from prospects, Watts endows Rachel with a soft, compassionate tone of voice, her eyes shining with sympathy at others' tragic stories, or unadulterated horror at the content of the cursed video. She balances the clinical professionalism of a reporter driven to unlock the answers to her latest mystery with the relatable humanity of a mother forced to remember that her son is the guiding force in her life that supersedes any accomplishment in her work. No moment crystalizes that realization more than when Rachel wakes up from a nightmare in the middle of the night and finds Aidan watching the tape. Watts lets out a screaming, prolonged "No!" before running up to Aidan, collapsing to her knees, wrapping her hands around his eyes, as if to erase the ghastly images they've already consumed, and hyperventilating. She ejects the tape from the VHS player and tosses it under a couch. "Why, baby, why? Why?" she screams with tears welling in her eyes. You can hear the trifecta of confusion, anger, and anguish in her voice. She holds him tightly to her chest, terrified that this could be one of her last opportunities to do so. Then the phone rings. Certain of what she'd hear on the other end, Rachel rushes to the phone and hangs it up. It rings again. This time, she answers, screaming at the top of her lungs, "Leave him alone!" with the protectiveness and authority of a mama bear, sinking to her knees in relief at the sound of Noah's voice instead. "He watched the tape," Watts whimpers. When asked who, she replies in a haunting whisper, "Our son," before breaking down in a silent cry. It's a deeply emotional, heartfelt performance free of restraint or artifice, one that shines most poignantly when directed to bare her soul in response to either the threat of the life of her son or the actual taking of the life of her companion for whom she was beginning to rediscover her love. In concept, a grown woman screaming at a tape, "What do you want from me?," smashing it into pieces, and burning it in the fireplace sounds silly, but Watts brings emotional authenticity to this very moment with her pinpoint expression of grief-fueled anger, heartbreak, and survivor's guilt.
In the role of said companion and sidekick, Martin Henderson is gifted the greatest character development enjoyed by any onscreen figure in Kruger's script. When he's initially called in to the mystery by his former girlfriend and mother of his son, Noah is a typical but rationally understandable skeptic. A video expert who lives alone with no responsibilities, he doesn't believe that this tape possesses the supernatural power to kill those who watch it, but he'll humor Rachel to make her feel better. Henderson invests Noah with a note of sarcasm, cockiness, and condescension in his introductory scenes. "So, you been working a lot?" he asks after taking a bite of an apple, meekly inferring that her paranoia stems from a lack of sleep. "I'm not tired, Noah, " Rachel insists. "Okay," he replies, his tone sweetly but insincerely compliant. In Rachel's bluntly critical words, Noah is "a flake who never finishes anything," a criticism Henderson responds to with a charming smile that lends his face a boyish charm. He may not be willing to "get all worked up over some high school rumor," but he does have a good heart, as demonstrated by his affection for Rachel. More out of morbid curiosity than genuine belief in the supernatural, Noah insists that Rachel let him watch the tape. His response once it's over: "No credits. That was a very student film." Upon seeing the daggers reflecting in her eyes, he nervously concedes, "Though I'm sure it's a lot scarier at night." Henderson plays Noah as a suave, carefree bachelor who uses humor to dilute the tension of an interaction, essentially a grown man still mired in the blissful lifestyle of a teenager.
However, once he witnesses the seriousness of the curse for himself and realizes his life is now in danger, Noah evolves instantly from a laid-back, wisecracking man-child into the mature, dedicated partner and father Rachel and Aidan need. He begins to take Rachel seriously and immerses himself into their investigation with wholehearted commitment, acting as a true partner and rediscovering his passion for her and Aidan along the journey. Kruger is thoughtful enough to provide Noah with a motivation for his past failures, revealing that he abandoned the two most important people in his life out of fear that he wouldn't make a good father on account of his own having been "such a disappointment." A match made in heaven, Noah turns out to share similar qualities to those of Rachel: he's protective over his loved ones, willing to apply cunning in pursuit of answers, and grows frustrated over setbacks. Even the strength and ferocity with which Henderson repeatedly slams an axe into a wooden floor highlights the degree of his devotion, that when he puts his mind to something, he pursues it with unflinching determination and urgency.
As the object of Rachel and Noah's devotion, the impetus to their partnership, David Dorfman subverts the stereotype of the adorable, frightened child tasked with little more than looking adorable and acting frightened. On the contrary, while Dorfman is handsome, his is of a more unique type. From the moment we meet Aidan following the prologue, sitting by himself in his classroom, drawing a picture while waiting for his mother to pick him up, it's clear he's different from the majority of kids his age. A little boy burdened in the early stages of processing the death of his older cousin, whom he considered more as a best friend, Aidan is wise beyond his years. Whereas his father has lived most of his life as a teenager trapped in an adult man's body, Aidan is the opposite: an adult man trapped in a little boy's body. One of the most notable aspects of Dorfman's portrayal is his near-complete lack of a smile. There are only two instances to the contrary: one is a picture of him beaming with Katie, suggesting that, while his mother would be away at work, Katie was the true parental figure in his life, and the other is a ghost of a smile that manifests at the sight of his parents rekindling their relationship.
In personality and performance, Aidan evokes Cole Sear from The Sixth Sense. Similar to Cole, Aidan is quiet, introspective, precocious, introspective, and self-sufficient, with a disconcerting habit of expressing his repressed negative feelings and thoughts through violent drawings that raise the eyebrows of his teachers. Preferring to contain his grief over Katie, he copes not with talking, but drawing pictures of her sleeping with fish. He makes his own lunch -- a classic peanut butter and jelly sandwich -- and walks himself to school, even in the rain. On his way, he passes his father, who he's seen wandering around the yard at his school. Aidan knows exactly who he is, despite Noah's efforts at incognito, but chooses not to engage. As much as he unquestionably needs both of his parents in his life, Aidan isn't helpless when it comes to providing for himself. While preparing for Katie's funeral, he lays out his mother's dress ahead of schedule and dresses himself in a black suit, adjusting his own tie in a mirror. If he does feel resentment toward Rachel and Noah for their neglect of him, he withholds it with the maturity and understanding of a grownup.
Even though he appears in merely two scenes, Brian Cox leaves a lasting impression as Richard Morgan, the father of Samara and widower of Anna. At one point in time, Richard and Anna were horse breeders struggling to conceive a child. Anna suffered multiple miscarriages, ultimately leading the couple to adopt a little girl named Samara. Following the filicide of their daughter and the subsequent guilt-induced suicide of Anna, Richard has devolved into a hermit. He no longer breeds horses due to an outbreak of suicide instigated by Samara, spending his days alone around his farmhouse, tending his property. For his introduction, Cox presents Richard as placid and communicative, willing to put his tools away for a few minutes to amicably answer some questions about the unexplained suicides of his horses. However, as Rachel's questions become more personal and intrusive, Cox grows impatient and resentful, painting a concise, sympathetic portrait of a tortured old man who's lost everything that mattered in his life and wants only to be left alone with things he can control and no more people he has to worry about losing. At a certain point, Cox refrains from making eye contact with Watts while talking, his voice emanating world-weariness and his eyes haunted with unprocessed grief. Richard is a ticking time bomb waiting for the right intrusion to set him off, and once Rachel crosses that line, Cox explodes into a torrent of physical violence and verbal outbursts, giving voice to the pent-up anger, misery, and fear festering in his heart. Having suffered enough at the vindictive hands of his deceased daughter, Richard decides to end his life, and Cox's breathy delivery of his parting line ("Oh, yes. She will. She never sleeps.") is chilling in its quiet menace.
Despite the bevy of outstanding performances that ground The Ring's supernatural story in emotional reality, an argument could be made that the real star of this J-horror remake is the resplendent cinematography by Bojan Bazelli. For location, Verbinski elected to set The Ring in Seattle, owing to its "wet and isolated" atmosphere. He couldn't have found a better conduit for his aptitude for gloomy atmosphere, allowing the entirety of Kruger's story to unfold against the backdrop of a perpetual rainstorm. The sky is always gray and almost always crying violently in a torrential downpour, a poetic visual expression of the mindset of the characters, all of whom are either in the throes of grief or racing against time to save themselves and their loved ones from being grieved. Verbinski and Bazelli utilize the rain to accentuate the funereal gloominess that permeates every scene. While there are times when the characters are stuck outside in the rain, Verbinski prefers a more specific visual style: filming God's tears from behind the windows and windshields of cars, or the window of an upstairs bedroom. It paves the way for the most eye-wateringly picturesque scenery of any horror film I've ever seen.
Going hand in hand with the natural atmospheric condition of Seattle is Verbinski's choice of color, saturating the screen in a palette of mint-green to visualize the sickly, melancholic ambience of encroaching doom. When the protagonists are traveling to the next destination of their journey, Bazelli exploits the opportunity to capitalize on the austere grandeur of Seattle's scenery, using aerial shots to feast upon mountains, rivers, long, narrow roads surrounded by trees. He frequently returns to a shot of a Japanese maple tree backdropped by rapidly moving gray clouds. The sun shines on the leaves, illuminating them in a fiery orange sheen. The waves of an ocean wash over rocks. Cabin 12 at Shelter Mountain Inn, where Katie and her friends and Rachel unintentionally marked themselves for Samara's wrath, is covered in moss and surrounded by towering, skinny trees, many of them bare of leaves.
The most thought-provoking shot, however, occurs while Noah is watching the tape in Rachel's apartment. Rachel steps outside onto her deck and, in the style of James Stewart's protagonist from Rear Window, finds herself staring into the windows of her neighbors across the street, all of whom are planted in front of their TV. One woman steps outside for a smoke while leaving her daughter in the company of the TV. After taking a drag, the woman looks up, and she and Rachel lock eyes. The smoker looks vaguely offended and guilty, while Rachel's expression reads of sympathy for both the mother and her daughter. What's the meaning behind this shot? Is Verbinski issuing a lament for how prevalent we've allowed television to become in our lives? A reminder that death is coming for all of us at some point, and a condemnation of how some of us welcome it sooner than needed with our own lethal habits that we selfishly choose to indulge in for momentary pleasure?
The score is composed by Hans Zimmer, and it's one of the greatest in horror, utilizing string instruments, piano, and a synthesizer to produce a soundscape that's as soothing and somber as the scenery it's accompanying. It elicits a similar sensation to that of a lullaby, beautiful in a way that rivets our attention without actually lulling us to sleep. Zimmer uses propulsive, pulse-pounding, fast-moving violin strings to accentuate scenes of urgency and hightened tension, such as the escape of a horse on a ferry and Rachel's desperate run to save Noah after realizing his life is in danger. For more tranquil scenes of Rachel and Noah driving home or to Shelter Mountain Inn in the rain, Zimmer opts for the peaceful melody of a piano and slower-paced violin.
The body count of The Ring is remarkably low. Only two characters are killed onscreen by the antagonist: Katie in the opening, and Noah toward the end. Four other characters are also killed by Samara: Josh Turandot, Katie's boyfriend, and his two friends, Scott Conroy and Stacey Miller. However, Kruger keeps their deaths off-screen, revealing them in writing in a newspaper. The details are grim: Josh supposedly threw himself from his own seven-story apartment, while Stacey and Scott died in a car accident. All of their deaths occurred at 10 p.m. the same night Katie died. Kruger and Verbinski take a sophisticated approach, trusting their audience to read these lines of exposition without feeling obligated to appease us with grisly flashbacks visualizing every bloody, sordid detail. In between the bookending onscreen kills, The Ring plays out as a visually and emotionally intoxicating detective mystery, with unsettling imagery to keep us on the edge of our seat.
The visuals and makeup effects in this movie are among the most squirm-inducing and skin-crawling ever committed to celluloid. Samara Morgan possesses the psychic gift of thoughtography, the ability to transfer images from her mind onto objects and into the minds of other people. True to his antagonist's modus operandi, Verbinski conjures images that will remain as etched into the minds of his viewers as they are in Samara's victims. The video tape that functions as the MacGuffin of The Ring contains pure, Lynchian nightmare fuel: a box of severed, still-twitching fingers, a close-up of a horse's eye, a fingernail breaking, a behemoth of a centipede crawling out from beneath a table, a ring-shaped view of the lid of a well, shot from the bottom, with light shining around the edges, a woman brushing her hair in a round-shaped mirror, the ghost of Samara disappearing into the blackness within the same mirror, horses lying dead on a shore, a dog limping into a barn, a burning Japanese maple tree, a sea of maggots transforming into an abyss of floundering humans, a woman throwing herself off a cliff, a mouth regurgitating an intestine, and a puddle of blood superseding the water of an ocean. Some of these images are memories from Samara's life, such as a chair in the middle of a room and a ladder propped against a barn wall; others foreshadow ominous events that have yet to transpire. The most cringe-inducing image, however, isn't featured on the tape; it's an agonizingly extended nightmare in which Rachel pulls the string of an electrode out of her throat while gagging painfully.
When Samara comes face to face with a victim who failed to escape their seven-day deadline, the visualization of her effect is grotesque and nightmarish; their faces instantaneously disfigure and mummify into a putrid green complexion, slack-jawed as if frozen in a stunted scream. Verbinski employs a specific, understated style for depicting this facial transformation, zooming in at breakneck speed to show the rapidity of deterioration before abruptly cutting to a series of images from the tape, ending with static. Editor Wood permits one extra glimpse for each victim courtesy of a jarring flash frame, the most terrifying of which finds Katie sitting in her closet with her hands clasped together in contrition before her head droops down. A prolonged screech accompanies the flash frames and plays throughout the video tape, exacerbating the air of unease. Verbinski's presentation of Noah's corpse is demonically inventive in its blocking and editing. After racing in to his apartment, Rachel stops dead in her tracks, surveying the chaos. A shelf has been knocked over. Shards of glass lie scattered on the floor, alongside bloody handprints. Across the room is Noah, sitting in his leather chair facing a static TV. The phone is ringing, but he appears to be ignoring it. Rachel hangs up and slowly approaches, a sense of dreadful resignation permeating her entire body. She doesn't call out his name. She's almost certain he's no longer there. For the sake of confirmation, she spins his chair around, and just before his face has the chance to come into view, Wood cuts to the reaction of Rachel, her face contorting with horror and repulsion as she lets out an ear-piercing scream that echoes into the next shot of her heading for the stairwell in silent tears.
The costume and makeup design for Samara is masterful in its nightmarish simplicity, giving rise to the trend of female ghosts in supernatural horror. For the majority of the runtime, Samara isn't shown in the flesh. Rather, her haunting presence is felt in the surreal images her mind has etched onto the tape and in the anxiety caused by the ringing of a telephone. In her human form, Daveigh Chase presents her as a pretty but deeply disturbed child who desires to cause suffering to others without knowing why or how to curb the urge. In a creepily innocent little-girl voice, while imprisoned in a mental hospital for observation, she begs desperately to see her mother while acknowledging her father's hatred of her. As a ghost hell-bent on transferring the pain and suffering she endured as a child onto innocent mortals like a virus, Samara is a petrifying creation. Her face, once beautiful and pure, if morose, lies curtained behind her long, black hair. The white nightgown in which she died is soaked in the water of the well, tattered and dirtied. Her flesh is decayed, evocative of zombification. When her hair blows to the sides, her face is contorted in a glare of resent-filled fury. All she has to do is make eye contact with a victim, human or animal, to enable a heart attack or the urge to commit suicide.
In the most nightmarishly innovative and seamlessly executed special effect, Samara, after emerging on tape from the well, lumbers forward and crawls through the screen of Noah's TV. After she stands up, Wood uses a jump cut to advance her directly in front of a petrified Noah, causing him to fall backward against a shelf. Under Verbinski's dreamlike and contemplative direction, Wood edits at a tonally appropriately slow tempo, zeroing in on the details of the protagonists' investigation to immerse the audience in their determination, desperation, and disorientation. Many portions of the story are devoted to Rachel reading articles about the Morgan family in a library or Noah reading a file about Anna in the record room of a mental health facility, but because of Wood's tight editing that never allows a scene to drag or linger in a wasteful place, as well as the aurally intoxicating music by Zimmer, the mystery never loses an ounce of intrigue. The Ring is an artfully restrained, dialogue-driven horror film whose emphasis is on character development and relationship building more so than rushing to the next kill or shocking revelation. Kruger's script allows the mystery to unfold organically through dialogue that's realistic, intellectually stimulating, and occasionally lighthearted and witty. On his way out of Rachel's apartment, following their falsely assumed triumph over the curse, Noah tells Rachel to "Call me sometime. Unless you're renting a movie."
In the final analysis, The Ring is an allegory for the inescapability of death and cyclical nature of violence. No matter how desperately we strive to avoid it, all of us are guaranteed to meet our maker at some point. Our time on this earth is as precious as it is ephemeral, and the only option we have is to make the most of our time while we're here. The characters in this movie are issued a death sentence simply by watching a video tape. Once the final image has been viewed and the screen cuts to static, their only chance at survival is to show the tape to someone else, transferring the mortal disease to some other poor, unsuspecting soul. Then they must pass it along to someone else, and so on, so forth. That's precisely what our remaining protagonists do. Rachel, driven by the most fundamental instinct to protect her son from Samara's wrath, assists Aidan in making a copy of the tape. Their final interaction is haunting in its implication and moral ambiguity. "It's going to keep going, isn't it?" Aidan sagely asks. "She'll never stop." For Rachel, Aidan's survival is all that matters. This is a matter of basic self-preservation, prioritizing the safety and well-being of oneself and our own loved ones over those of strangers. "Don't worry, sweetie, you're gonna be okay," she assures him. "What about the person we show it to?" Aidan empathically ponders. "What happens to them?" Unable to answer, Rachel redirects her emotionless gaze to the TV screen, aware that their survival means a gruesome death for someone else.
Does this decision to enable Samara in her never-ending rampage make Rachel a monster herself? Or at least complicit in the deaths of countless people whom she'll never meet? Perhaps. But the genius of the ending lies in the universality of its message, the acknowledgment that every one of us would make the exact same decision under this circumstance in the name of protecting ourselves and, more importantly, our children, the most innocent and vulnerable among us. As a species, we're inherently selfish. In its own hushed, tranquil style, The Ring implicates us all in that. While nothing particularly eventful transpires in this final scene, and our heroes are at least temporarily free from the Grim Reaper's scythe, the sheer notion that the nightmare isn't over, that this disease will live on indefinitely and infect anyone with whom it comes into contact, leaves a bitter, sobering, thought-provoking chill that lingers long after the screen fades to a thematically symbolic black.
9.4/10
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