It's the fifth Letterboxd Season Challenge! Theme eight, part one - a foreign horror film!
(Chosen by me!)
I think it only fair to begin by noting how a proper discussion of Ring inevitably clashes against spoilers, spoilers everyone knows about though they be. Ever since Hideo Nakata's adaptation of Kōji Suzuki's 1991 horror novel literalized the "frightened to death" aspect of the Ring Virus by transforming the moment of death from a simple hallucination-induced heart attack to vengeful ghost Sadako crawling from the well that served as her grave and out the victim's television to enact an abstracted killing blow, a pale, stringy-haired girl in white has been the franchise's defining image. Appropriately so, given it's an incredibly striking sight no matter the execution, an extension of the book's technology-as-conduit-for-supernatural-curse concept in a way friendly to continuous reinvention across the American remakes and numerous sequels in both Japan and the US during a time of rapid technological evolution, in a manner the original restriction to video tapes and phone calls couldn't hope to make interesting beyond changing the cursed tape's medium. Thanks to Nakata's not-quite original and Gore Verbinski's The Ring making such an enormous splash in their respective markets, Sadako crawling from YOUR TV has become fodder for nightmares and jokes aplenty in the last twenty years. You talk about Ring, you talk about the TV thing.
As such, talking about Ring by focusing on the film's bulk concerns across its runtime makes the lack of televised emergence conspicuous by its absence. The journey undertaken by journalist and single mother Reiko Asakawa and her videographer ex-husband Ryūji Takayama across the second and third acts involves a great deal of level-headed investigative work into the origins of the cursed tape, with a mind towards breaking the curse by laying the ghost to rest. There's absolutely no paranormal activity beyond the tape's evil aura until an hour's way in, which presents as psychic visions rather than hauntings, and Sadako's signature manifestation doesn't take place until the final ten minutes as a twist about how the protagonists were dead wrong as to her nature. If I were to play coy with this and try to preserve the twist for everyone, it wouldn't work, because you all know what made Sadako iconic, and you'd figure out all my talk about plain Jane research and agonizing over retrieving the body of a wrongfully murdered woman was all mere prelude to a twist, simply by way of my not mentioning someone coming out a TV screen. So we're just gonna note how the film's big famous moment can't function as a legit surprise anymore if you've extremely basic working knowledge of the culture, and move on to more fertile discussion.
Like I mention, Reiko's response to the cursed tape and her seven day deadline is more rational and intelligent than one might expect from a supernatural curse story. There's an element of dogged pursual to her early movements, an undefined, restless need to see the cause behind her niece's sudden, inexplicable death days earlier, the kind've unknowing march towards doom you'd conjure when thinking of the paranormal intersecting with the mundane. Once she's viewed the brief, surreal tape and been warned of her fate (no "Seven days..." whisper over the phone in this version, just the same eerie metallic scraping sounds from the tape), though, her next moves are all very sensible - contact someone she knows and can trust who has relevant experience studying and dissecting taped media, exercise her skills as a journalist, and start looking for a solution based on slowed-down viewings and cross-referencing. A good chunk of the film passes with Reiko and Ryūji studying the tape frame-by-frame, seeking out clues and dissecting hidden meanings from the seemingly disconnected imagery, which gives the film this strange yet appealing atmosphere of extended repetition making the sights and sounds yet more disconcerting mixed with the reassurance of discovery and understanding. Ring plays in large part like a serious-minded murder mystery, with the curse hanging overhead as a vague, barely-comprehended threat.
The horror, therefore, comes about through the increasing inadequacies of their method. No matter how much Reiko extracts from the tape or how close she comes to understanding its origins and breaking the curse, it's not enough to prevent her young son from watching the tape late at night in a mid-movie twist, condemning him to the same fate without him ever knowing what he's done. The work necessary to to unravel clues and discover new angles takes time, and on-screen captions remind us how quickly Reiko's clock is running down; it seems like no time at all between the roomy seven day starting point and our arrival at an all-too-close two. Despite a rather blase attitude towards confirmation of psychic phenomena on both leads' part (one I suspect worked better in the book, where the protagonist's journalistic background had an element of past failed paranormal exposés), contact with various psychically burnt objects and persons as they get closer and closer to Sadako produces more overtly freaked-out reactions, and marks the characters' potential inability to handle the situation before them. It gets a little bit clunky when the film uses overt flashes of the tape's imagery and sound to remind us how certain places, objects, and persons relate back to the clues rather than subtler interlacing, or when negative turns are accompanied by the otherwise quiet score going utterly manic on the screechy strings, but in total effect the build rests on a solid foundation of exposing the limitations inherent to rational thinking when faced against the beyond.
When it comes time for the movie to climax, the twist enables it to do so twice in a row, with distinct approaches to the payoff. In the first, Reiko and Ryūji's toilsome efforts to empty the abandoned well and retrieve Sadako's body may not entirely parse as to why the characters believe doing so will save their skins, but it turns on the great image of Reiko hauling heavy buckets over the course of many hours as her body grows weary and the sight of honeycombed crawlspace barriers facing the outside takes on a distinct menace, even knowing nothing's coming. When she and Ryūji swap places and she's rooting around in the stagnant wellwater for the corpse, the shift to a damper, more claustrophobic environment continues the film's sense of undefined paranoia, and brings it to the head with the discovery of the corpse, oozing slime from its sockets like grateful tears as the seventh day fully passes and Reiko is saved... only for it all to come to bunk. Just as the fake-out climax trades on an intensified version of the vaguely menacing feel of the preceding story with the payoff seemingly reward for such diligence under pressure, Sadako's sudden emergence stomps all over any sense of fairness or meaning to the film's events, killing Ryūji for reasons we cannot understand. Once Reiko puts two and two together, and realizes it was not their hard work towards discovering Sadako's origins and laying her bones to rest that broke the curse, but rather the most innocuous, natural step she took that transferred it instead, the story attains a wonderfully nasty bent. There's a demand for cruelty from anyone who views the tape, a need to intentionally expose others and expect them to do the same in a never-ending cycle, and that's just that. The relief of thinking those tested investigative convictions finally paid off, followed immediately by proof positive they're useless against real evil.
For its strengths, Ring does seem a touch lacking in a few places. The gender-flipping of the protagonist from the book's Kazuyuki Asakawa to Reiko and the subsequent change of Ryūji from friend to divorced husband introduces the possibility for a more meaningful relationship dynamic between the two, one the film does not adequately explore outside a few brief moments. It's more focused on the process of understanding and halting the curse than exploring the characters doing so in great depth, and so leaves them in a bit of an emotional limbo regarding one another. Something similar effects Reiko's relationship with her son, who's obviously very important to her yet drops from the film once he views the tape, to serve as little more than another reason to break the curse beyond Reiko dies. These noted, the picture still goes plenty far on the journey to test how much a rational series of questions are worth under unusual and demanding circumstances, and the sheer meanness of its twist lands with a satisfactory thwack even when you know it's coming and spend the whole film waiting to see someone scramble out've an analogue set. Much as later entries and online culture have diluted the special, unique fear of Sadako's emergence (coming out of a Jumbotron at scale is a natural evolution, but it is also extremely silly), Ring's dedication to earning that sigh of relief before gutpunching the wind from your lungs ensures its USP continues to demonstrate value as a scare worthy of the construction around it.
(I rather like how every other element of the tape has a concrete explanation, including the audio playing over the crawling figures, yet the crawling figures themselves remain unexplored and open to interpretation. Adds to the creepiness and the sense of the investigation coming to naught.)
3.5/5
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