Based on a phenomenally successful 1998 Japanese film, “The Ring” is stealthy horror film that seeps its way under your skin, washing over you like a cold, wet, Seattle rain that leaves you shivering hours later. What begins as a morose bit of moody film making, slowly and slyly evolves into an evocative, sophisticated study of malevolence that preys on our ultimate fear — despite our noble efforts, true evil can never be stopped.
“The Ring” begins innocuously enough with two teenage girls, alone in a dark house, recounting the latest urban legend making the rounds in their small Washington town. It seems there is a mysterious video tape that kills you seven days after you watch it. Unfortunately, one of the girls knows this tape all too well. She has seen it … exactly seven days ago. At this moment, the film could have veered into the realm of the ridiculous, but Verbinski and cinematography Bojan Bazelli establish the mood early. Saturated in gray and green, this sequence, the very definition of hair-raising, creeps and inches its way towards its climax, letting the audience stir in the juices of their own anxiety.
Rachel (Naomi Watts), a jaded journalist for the Seattle PI and the doomed teenager’s aunt, seeks to uncover the who, what and where of this mythical tape’s origins, but not before exposing herself, her ex-boyfriend (Martin Anderson) and her son (David Dorfman) to the video’s deadly taint. The video itself, a sinister series of surrealist images I will spend years in psychotherapy trying to forget, becomes the key to unlocking a series of long forgotten mysteries on a dreary, foreboding island. But sometimes, things were locked away for a reason.
Naomi Watts, who earned well-deserved praise for her breakthrough role in another surrealist romp “Mulholland Drive,” establishes herself as a solid, dynamic lead. Rachel is not a sympathetic character. She is an aggressively stubborn, self-centered woman who is seems oblivious to her son’s needs (he even calls her Rachel instead of “mom”). Yet, Watts manages to infuse her character with an undercurrent of warmth and passion that are pushed slowly to the surface as the fabric of Rachel‘s reality begins to tear.
The film itself is awash in undercurrents all its own. Beyond the murky surface of flickering imagery, the film gradually reveals itself, not as a reductive fight of good versus evil, but as a more complex examination of evil’s capacity to seep, to corrupt those that seek to look upon its face (however innocent that face may seem). What makes the film so potent is the realization that no one is free from evil’s taint. Evil needs to be seen. It needs to be heard. It will never stop.
At the heart of any good horror film is the notion that true evil can never be defeated. It lives in all of us, works through his, invades us and infects us like a sickness and, in the end, we are all helpless.
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