The Ring 2002

[7.3/10] The Ring is a well-built movie that doesn’t really move me. It has a strong central premise, some quality scares, a propulsive story, and a solid twist. But the characters do next to nothing for me. So the end result is that for a movie so well-constructed, I admire it more than I actually like it.

Some of that’s on screenwriter Ehren Kruger. Protagonist Rachel Keller, a reporter investigating the mysterious tape that purportedly killed her niece, is a cipher. She mainly exists to solve the mystery, and doesn’t have much of a life or personality that extends beyond it. Her relationship with her son, Aidan; her ex and co-parent, Noah; or anyone else in her orbit is all underwritten. And we get more personality from her in a two minute conversation with her kid’s teacher in the opening reel of the film than we do in the rest of the movie. She is a vessel to move the plot along, which, ironically, makes it tough to invest in that plot when the movie doesn’t give you a reason to care about the character at the center of it.

Some of it’s on Naomi Watts, who plays Rachel. Watts has her laurels from better work, but this isn’t her best outing, alternatively coming off too flat and unengaging or too overdone in her performances. But maybe it’s a directorial choice, since even with supremely talented character actors filling out the picture, the performances across the board seem to veer between cold and detached and playing to the cheap seats.

Rachel’s ex, Noah, is a dull dope, who I guess is supposed to be slyly charming but mostly comes off as annoying. The people he and Rachel interact with on their way to solving the mystery of this deadly tape are largely disposable and interchangeable. The one exception is young Aidan, played to creepy, almost otherworldly perfection, by David Dorfman, who gets too little screen time given how gripping his “beyond-his-years kid who senses something’s wrong” routine is.

That said, The Ring delivers plenty of the creep factor with alacrity apart from Aidan. The infamous tape is suitably unnerving, walking the line between artsy student film (which Noah amusingly points out) and disturbing found footage. Director Gore Verbinski does well with smaller yet still visceral scares, like Rachel picking a fly right out of a videotape in a subtle bit of foreshadowing, or coughing up an electrical lead that hints to ghostly murder victim Samara’s treatment in a mental hospital.

He and his team do well with the bigger sequences too. The most captivating and disturbing scene in the whole movie is minimally supernatural. Instead, it’s the simple but chaotic scene of a spooked horse getting loose on a ferry, hinting at the effect Samara has on animals, while creating the terror of a frightened animal unleashed in an enclosed space and the pathos of an innocent creature effectively scared to death.

Likewise, the final confrontation between Noah and Samara herself lives up to the build. The wraith’s T.V. escape, dripping crawl, and stalking gait heighten the fear and tension that the entire movie has led up to. Samara herself is a fright to behold. And it’s a nice bookend with the opening scene with Rachel’s niece and a friend that establishes the rules of the game and plays with the audience’s expectations with some nicely tense feints and scares. On pure spook-factor alone, The Ring earns its keep.

It’s also the rare big time scary movie where the main characters don’t feel, well, stupid. In a strange way, The Ring is the horror equivalent of All the President’s Men. Rachel is first and foremost a journalist, and uses those skills to get to the bottom of what’s happening. Sometimes, that’s a touch convenient (she just so happens to find the right lighthouse in a big book of lighthouses?), but it’s nice to see someone digging into these supernatural happenings logically and practically. The way she investigates the case, analyzes the tape with experts, takes pragmatic steps to ensure others don’t get hurt by it, is all downright refreshing in a genre that’s often built on dumb characters making dopey choices before they’re cut down.

That said, The Ring does feel like one of the most distinctively early 2000s films ever made. Some of that stems from the fact that it’s the rare film actively founded on the technology of the time: VHS tapes, developed photographs, boxy televisions, and landline telephone calls. The tech involved automatically makes the film feel of a particular era.

Some of it stems from the visuals. The movie comes with the same washed out, green-tinted color-grading that scads of films adopted in the wake of The Matrix. And while Verbinski and company do toy with the lighting in big sequences like the sunset on the final day, and some more impressionistic imagery when the horror arrives, the dingy, antiseptic quality of everything marks the movie as a 2002 film even if you didn’t know the release date.

Some of it, though, stems from the movie’s themes. One of the big themes here is neglectful or absentee parents. The motif was already more than a bit provincial by the early 2000s, but there’s a parallel here between the young wraith Samara in the past, and young Aidan in the present.

Samara was a little girl who “just wanted to be heard” and yet was unwanted and isolated by her parents (albeit for understandable reasons given her terrifying effects on the environment around her). In a similar (though obviously less extreme) vein, Aidan is often left in the care of babysitters because his mom seems to care more about her work, to the point that he calls her by his first name, and his dad has all but exempted himself from fatherhood. The sense of “Oh no, kids will be neglected with working moms and layabout dads” has a certain pearl-clutching quality that, while certainly not limited to 2002, fits in with that time.

Likewise, the other big theme in the film is the dangers of being glued to the television. That too feels a bit quaint as a cultural phobia. (If it hasn’t happened already, one imagines the modern sequel would feature people glued to their phones.) But it’s a recurring image and idea across the picture.

The early victims discuss television waves destroying brain cells. When Rachel gazes across the way from her ex’s building, she sees apartment after apartment of strangers gazing at the idiot box. The scene of Samara’s mental hospital recording sees a girl being monitored on a screen by an attendant who’s being watched on a screen by Noah whose perspective is being observed on a screen by the audience.

And, of course, the meta-twist at the end of the film is the notion that Samara’s curse cannot be extinguished, only passed on, with the audience itself seeing the titular ring that portends ill-fortune at the end of the movie. (And eagle-eyed viewers will catch frames of it before then.) The sense of T.V. screens as the great danger, literally and by metaphor, comes off like a hoary preoccupation that, if anything, predates the era of the film’s release.

That said, the final twist is a good one. Savvy audience members can probably guess that, by the mere fact of Noah telling Rachel, “It’s over,” that it must certainly not be over. But the faux-resolution with Rachel uncovering Samara’s story, thinking that she’s given the girl peace by providing for a proper burial, only to realize that she has, instead, merely unleashed more evil unto the world, is still a solid sucker punch. And there is some poetry in Samara’s mother being willing to sacrifice her own child to protect the world from evil, while after all of this, Rachel is willing to subject the world to evil to protect her child.

All of this adds up to a well-considered, solidly-built, scare-filled dose of cinematic horror. Its run features quality craft, its story has a pull from Rachel steadily uncovering the truth, and there’s something going on in the hood. But it speaks to how vital character is to these kinds of stories. As pure plot and pure fear factor, the movie succeeds. Except that the story and scares are neutered a bit without a protagonist or other figures whose connections and well-being are worth caring about. Without characters who jump off the screen, The Ring’s legacy is only in the characters who actually jump off the screen.