A Movie Worth Dying For

The Ring is the first American remake of a Japanese blockbuster horror film that I have ever seen. It is also the first chillingly excellent American remake of a Japanese blockbuster that I have ever seen.

The plot centers around a videotape that kills its viewers on the seventh day after they watch it. As the film begins, we learn that the niece of the film’s protagonist, a journalist named Rachel (Naomi Watts), has died under very unusual circumstances. Using her investigative skills and instincts, Rachel begins to ask questions about her niece’s death, and hears rumors of the strange, deadly tape.

Further sleuthing leads Rachel to the tape, which, of course, she promptly proceeds to pop it into her VCR and watch. Immediately afterwards, Rachel’s phone rings, and an unearthly voice tells her, in a not-very-nice tone, “seven days.” The rest of the movie is divided into seven episodes (day 1, day 2, etc), in which Rachel and her ex-lover Noah—conveniently an expert in video technology—attempt to determine the tape’s provenance.

Their searching leads them to a misty island near Seattle, a mental institution, a former horse-breeder with a disturbing family history and the bottom of a very deep well. And just when you start to think that the movie is going to have a cute, lame and satisfying resolution, there’s a pretty clever twist at the end that leaves you with a somewhat sour and uneasy taste in your mouth—that is, exactly what you should want from a movie of this variety.

I do have to confess that my standards for “excellent” are not quite as stringent for a horror film as for movies of other genres. Most horror flicks, that is, are so comically awful that anything with a semi-coherent plot and reasonably good acting already qualifies as decent, and the scale goes up or down from there. So, while The Ring surely is not The Godfather, or even American Beauty, for what it is, it’s quite good and worth seeing.

Australian actress Watts (known to some from her role in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive) does a good job of portraying Rachel, and child actor David Dorfman, who plays Rachel’s son Aidan, is quite a bit less irritating than Haley Joel Osment. The Ring could have benefited, though, from a better performance than the one New Zealander Martin Henderson delivers in his role as Noah. He isn’t bad, exactly, but decidedly mediocre and unspectacular.

While certainly not for the faint of heart, The Ring should be very pleasing for fans of thrillers and horror movies. For this reason, and because it may draw some much deserved attention to other Japanese films often overlooked by Hollywood and consequently this hemisphere, The Ring is a welcome addition to what has been a somewhat lackluster fall film season.