THE RING. American remake of a Japanese horror masterpiece
The rest is bland filler; one might say it’s supposed to be terrifying, but it can only be described as terrifyingly boring. The film opens with a sequence similar to Drew Barrymore’s cameo in Scream, but here it’s much less scary. Why this comparison? There’s also a menacing phone call and a killer lurking in the house… They say what you can’t see is more frightening. Following this line of thought, the anticipation of death is worse than death itself.
This is the basis of the entire premise of The Ring screenplay – Whoever watches the cursed tape, passes a death sentence on themselves – death in 7 days. The deadly timer starts counting down when the phone rings in the “lucky” person’s home. Several young people have just died, and a relative of one of the murdered girls decides to conduct a private investigation. She naturally begins by finding and watching the mysterious tape. A phone call sounds in her apartment, and the woman has seven days to unravel the mystery…
The beginning, as I mentioned, promises a truly exciting horror-thriller, containing recently popular paranormal themes. The film is structured in stages/chapters – each subsequent stage represents one of the days left to fulfill the prophecy. The woman begins the tedious task of reviewing the tape in search of clues that may lead her to solving the deadly puzzle. And from this moment on, everything falls flat; the atmosphere of horror summoned at the outset dissipates, the sense of racing against time vanishes, and the entire drama of a woman fleeing death evaporates somewhere. All that remains is to observe the painstaking and boring investigation, which isn’t very engaging. Only the middle of the film manages to lift you from your seat a bit. I’ll just say it involves a scene with a horse on a ferry – you’ll learn the rest from the movie. Later, the tension returns to zero and remains there until the slightly exciting finale.
Overall, though, The Ring, despite a few better moments, is tedious, and most (probably not the intention of the creators) the scariest part for me was the little son of the main character. At times, the lines like “She never sleeps,” “You will die soon,” “She sees you,” “She wants to see you” were downright tedious, being unintentionally or half-consciously uttered by the characters due to various visions. While the famous line “I see dead people” spoken by Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense has permanently etched itself into the viewers’ consciousness and become the subject of imitation and parody, the lines from The Ring are sometimes a parody in themselves. It simply gives the impression of “been there, done that,” and spiritual journeys into the human psyche, as well as all the visions, ghosts, and paranormal messages we witness, bring nothing new or groundbreaking. Yes, after The Sixth Sense and other spiritual “surprises,” it seems that this type of cinema has died out, and The Ring itself is the final nail in the coffin – a pity.
It’s also a shame that instead of inventing something new, Americans started making “their versions” of foreign hits. Take, for example, Vanilla Sky, which is not a very successful remake of Open Your Eyes by Alejandro Amenábar, or the aforementioned The Ring; supposedly, Americans are also planning to shoot an actor’s version of the cult Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo – and they reportedly changed quite a bit in the script, so it will probably end up as nothing more than a film made for the widest audience – a so-called popcorn commercial movie. Yet, as we know, Akira is a difficult film to grasp with an extraordinary plot, so the story will likely have to be simplified, and everything shown in a very straightforward manner – so that as many viewers as possible watch the film and have a chance to understand it.
Returning to the moderately successful American The Ring, a big plus is the “cursed film” itself, with its black-and-white images of all kinds of violence and disgust, reminiscent of Buñuel’s “Andalusian Dog.” This is undoubtedly a great treat for cinema connoisseurs. It’s also worth mentioning that we’ll see the already quite old Brian Cox in the role of the “girl’s father,” known for his role as Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter and recently Succession.
The Ring is a remake of the Japanese production from 1998 with the same title. The Japanese version gained such popularity that two more films were made in this cycle: Ring 0: Birthday, telling about events that took place before those from Ring, and… Ring 2.
Rafał Donica