Directed by Hideo Nakata. Written by Hiroshi Takahashi
The story of a haunted videotape that places a curse upon all who watch it, fating them to die in terror seven days later, is not bone-chilling because of the novelty of its premise but because of the familiarity of that which surrounds it. It doesn’t take place in space or in the middle of nowhere, allowing us to place it over there, far from us and ultimately safe. No, it’s happening right here, this story of dead teens with cracked faces, their eyes wide and mouth frozen in a blood-curdling howl, and reporters trying to solve a mystery on a literal deadline.
You live in Ring when you come home from school or from work, you watch it go by when you commute, you live in when you chill with your friends. It could be you that has a curse put upon you, its deadly intent inevitable and closing in; worst of all, it could befall you when doing the most commonplace thing of all: consuming media.
With this dread-inducing prospect and textbook horror movie direction, Hideo Nakata produces a frightfest that deserves its place in horror history if solely for the number of copycats it inspired, as it took an early stab at linking omnipresent technology with an inescapable doom. Even if some parts threaten to break the immersion of this terror set in everyday life, there’s no denying that fact.
Nanako Matsushima plays Reiko Asakawa, a journalist who begins looking into a supposedly cursed video tape after her niece dies under mysterious circumstances. Asakawa is skilled and committed, but Matsushima emphasizes her motherhood in her portrayal, the need for answers not rooted in professional routine, but the fear of a parent worried for both herself and her child.
Alongside her, Hiroyuki Sanada stars as her ex-husband Ryuji Takayama, a gruff math professor who’s somehow also in possession of psychic powers that become instrumental in tracking down the source of the tape. Takayama’s unexpected skill set feels a bit like a magic wandl to help Hiroshi Takahashi’s script along at times, and for a movie so intent on the mundane in its self-expression, this university professor with an unexplained clairvoyant ability does cut a strange figure in Nakata’s story.
Because the mundane is where Ring derives its power from. Apartments, houses, and offices are tidy, but lived-in, its victims recognizable and innocent by every standard. The world of Ring, despite its supernatural elements, is not foreign to us, but the one we occupy every day. When something completely beyond our comprehension then sets to prey on us, well, that’s terrifying, and especially so when something omnipresent in our familiar life, in this case the TV, becomes its avenue of intrusion.
Nakata adds to the eeriness by draining his movie of much of its color and the world of Ring is bereft of people. It doesn’t immediately strike the eye, but once you consider how densely populated a country like Japan is, and the city of Tokyo in particular, any empty and quiet space suddenly feels unsettling. Ring is full of it.
It’s not just in its ideas that Ring impresses, it’s in its technical assembly as well as its understanding of the genre playbook. The jump scares and the subtle twanging of our nerves are down to tried-and-true maneuvers that get you despite you knowing better, and if that isn’t proof you know what you’re doing, I don’t know what is. Kenji Kawai provides a bugs-under-your-skin core and when you set it to Jun’ichirô Hayashi’s cinematography, the ominous tension never relents.
VHS tech aside, I wonder if Ring hits as hard for a younger audience than those who came of age during digitalisation. It’s easy to see why it shocked the world into a frenzy back then, with technology still an unknown quantity, and in particular the internet. All of a sudden you have this portal into your house wherefrom anything can pour, and the source and its veracity wasn’t easily identifiable. Spooky things online, however wacky, couldn’t easily be dismissed, and urban legends proliferated, their origins vague and intent insidious. There’s a reason why Blair Witch Project, released in 1999, did numbers based on rumors online that it was found footage.
Ring creates that same fear, using an achingly familiar piece of tech as a delivery system for something supernatural, suddenly haunting our modern world with the ghosts we thought we buried under our sterile plastic existence. Everything you know just became a little more scary, and that’s an ironclad legacy.
Mikkel Frederiksen 