The "Ring" trailers have been promising more screams than in the audience at the end of A "Hard Day's Night," but instead the movie delivers a psychological fear fug thick as the "Felicia's Journey" moor mists. The movie concerns a killer video tape featuring more disturbing, blurry black-and-white than a director's cut of "Begotten," a lighthouse that would have given Erika Eigen third thoughts about wanting to marry a lighthouse keeper and, since television is one of the key themes of the flick, a cute kid. Actually, this child, in one of two clever twists, is a creepy, hellacious, little freak who, while she died twenty years ago, seems to have learned to emulate Haley Joel Osment's "Sixth Sense" character's knack for ominously whispering shocking revelations. The other twist also concerns the television theme. Television shows, sitcoms especially, as a rule, usually provide satisfying, soppy resolutions by the end credits. That the ending of "Ring" is more open than a San Franciscoan is one of the subtlest and grandest lampoons I've seen in quite some time.
Naomi Watts plays a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter who is last in a long hereditary line of kin who, no doubt, have all been neatly dispatched by seedy hitchhikers picked up near slaughterhouses and hockey-masked serial killers who took advantage of her relatives' extensive butcher knife collections. She hears of a video tape that, after you watch it, you receive a phone call that is just three syllables, "Seven days." Sure enough, a week later you keel over dead. Not taking the gloomy under-lighting and Gothic architecture as cues that she's in a horror movie, Watts' character watches it and, you guessed it, gets a disturbing phone call. And, no, it's not some frat boy asking whether she's got Prince Henry in a can. Add to this, her son, who has an unusual appetitie for grainily-shot, amateur-film student, nightmare shorts, unable to sleep one night, watches it too.
Strange things start to happen. Every photograph the two have taken of themselves comes out with their faces blurry as the night before in "Dude, Where's My Car?" Things begin to manifest themselves in real life that they have seen on the video tape, which they keep watching and showing other people. Mostly because sticking their hands down kitchen sink drains to unplug garbage disposals while the camera tensely hovers on the unguarded on switch has begun to wear a little thin. And, to top it all off, Watts is constantly tailed by a floating, wish-granting Martian man with tv antennaes on his head. She must uncover the mystery of the video tape before her seven days are up. And since the writers have neglected to inform Watts she's in an existential, solutionless movie, the answers are about as easy to find as "Easy Rider's" Americana.
"Ring" is another attempt, as was "Lost Souls," to create a horror film purely out of atmosphere and eery music. Even some of the scenes are identical. Both movies feature characters tearing up a house to unbury pictures concealed within, whose import the audience has guessed centuries ago. Both feature banal dialogue, endings that are anything but final and spectacular shots of rippling water. That "Ring" succeeds is purely because it finds a way to creep under your skin that Souls' gorgeous mechanicalness does not. This movie is a few blocks down from Watts' last film, "Mulholland Drive." Actually, watching "Ring," I found myself more than once nodding and thinking, "So that's what a Lynch film looks like without all of the lesbian coupling." Oh, and P. S.: horse-lovers, this is the movie you've been waiting for.
A video tape is circling the globe. People watch it and receive a phone call stating that they only have one week left to live. Viewers of the tape di...More at HotMovieSale.com
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