Review: The Ring

Though not quite as callous as Bless the Child and Stigmata, Gore Verbinski’s anti-art film has been similarly put together with attention-deficit disorder.

The Ring
Photo: DreamWorks Pictures

Imagine avant-garde cinema as terror mechanism. In Gore Verbinski’s anti-art remake of Nikata Hideo’s Ringu, a journalist counts down the days till her fatal demise. Rachel Keller (Namoi Watts) learns that her niece and three friends watched a mysterious videocassette before they met their deaths seven days later. She finds the tape, pops it in the VCR and discovers Meshes of the Afternoon reimagined by Nine Inch Nails and Mark Romanek.

Once Rachel takes the Grim Reaper’s phone call, everything goes progressively to shit: the timecode on her video-dub acts screwy, her psychic son (David Dorfman) draws pictures from the “dark place,” and her ex-boyfriend (Martin Henderson) starts slamming file cabinets. While Nikata has nothing on Kurosawa Kiyoshi, he nonetheless eschews the kind of cheap scare tactics employed throughout this handsomely made yet preposterous facsimile. For Verbinski, a family’s Freudian baggage and the logistical details of Rachel’s investigation are far more important than contemplating the full-scale terror of copying the replicant ring virus.

Advertisement

Though not quite as callous as spiritual spookers Bless the Child and Stigmata, The Ring (or, more accurately, Nancy Drew and the Case of the North Pacific Conundrum) has been similarly put together with attention-deficit disorder; its favorite gimmicks include smashing things loudly and flashing tableaux morts on the screen for split seconds. More telling is Verbinski’s notion of subtlety, such as a mentally impaired kid slowly spinning on a merry-go-round.

Despite an overabundance of crane shots, Bojan Bazelli’s camerawork deserves some credit, as does the location scouting. One particularly remarkable exterior evokes the anomie of the film’s video age citizens though Verbinski kills the mood with a cheap Rear Window reference. Then again, if The Ring’s this-is-how-an-urban-legend-was-made intro isn’t any indication, the events depicted here have been seemingly manufactured for the Scream generation.

Score: 
 Cast: Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, Brian Cox, David Dorfman, Lindsay Frost, Amber Tamblyn, Rachel Bella, Daveigh Chase, Chris Cooper  Director: Gore Verbinski  Screenwriter: Ehren Kruger  Distributor: DreamWorks Pictures  Running Time: 109 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2002  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.