The Ring is a 2002 American psychological thriller directed by Gore Verbinski and starring Naomi Watts and Martin Henderson. It is an American remake of the 1998 Japanese horror film (also known as Ringu). Both films are based on the novel of the same name by Kôji Suzuki.The Ring was a critical and commercial success.
Plot
The film focuses on a mysterious cursed videotape which contains a seemingly random series of disturbing, black and white images. After watching the tape, the viewer receives a phone call in which the voice of a girl condemns the viewer to death in seven days.
As the film opens, two teenage girls, Katie Embry (Amber Tamblyn) and Rebecca 'Becca' Kotler (Rachael Bella), discuss a supposedly cursed tape while home alone at Katie's house. Katie reveals that, seven days before, she went to a cabin at Shelter Mountain Inn with friends, where she viewed the video tape. The girls laugh it off, but after a series of strange occurrences in the next few minutes, involving a television in the house turning itself on, Katie mysteriously and horrifically dies while Becca watches, causing Becca to be institutionalized in a mental hospital.
In the next act, we learn that a young boy has recently lost his cousin. It turns out that Katie is the cousin, and the boy's mom, Rachel (Naomi Watts), is Katie's aunt. At Katie's home after the funeral, Rachel's sister discusses the death of her daughter with Rachel and says, "I saw her face," implying that Katie did not die a natural death. Then an extremely disturbing image of the dead girl in a closet is flashed for a few seconds. Rachel's sister asks her to investigate her daughter's death, since Rachel is a journalist. The investigation leads her to the cabin where Katie watched the tape. Rachel finds and watches the tape; the phone rings, and she hears a child's voice say "Seven days." Rachel is most upset after the call. The next day she calls Noah, her ex-boyfriend and the father of her precocious son Aidan (who seems to be about 9-years-old) who has media-related skills, to show him the video. He asks her to make a copy for further investigation, which she does, but later takes it home herself. To Rachel's horror, she discovers Aidan watching the copy a few days later.
After viewing the tape, Rachel begins experiencing nightmares, nose bleeds, and surreal situations (for instance, when she pauses a section of the tape in which a fly runs across the screen, she is able to pluck the fly from the monitor). Increasingly anxious about getting to the bottom of the tape, Rachel investigates images of a woman seen in the tape. The woman turns out to be Anna Morgan, who lived on Moesko Island, Washington, many years prior with her husband Richard (Brian Cox). Rachel discovers that, after bringing home an adopted daughter, tragedy befell the Morgan ranch - the horses raised on the ranch went mad and killed themselves, which in turn causes Anna to become depressed and commit suicide. Rachel goes to the Morgan house and finds Richard, who refuses to talk about the video or his daughter and sends Rachel away. A local doctor tells Rachel that Anna could not carry a baby to term and adopted a child named Samara (Daveigh Chase). The doctor recounts that Anna soon complained about gruesome visions that only happened when Samara was around, so both were sent to a mental institution. While Rachel is investigating on Moesko Island, Noah is investigating the institution, where he finds Anna's file and discovers that there was a video of Samara, but the video is missing. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Rachel sneaks back to the Morgan house, comes across the missing video and is confronted by Richard, who says that the girl was evil. He then electrocutes himself in the bathtub, sending Rachel running out of the room screaming.
Noah arrives and, with Rachel, goes to the barn to discover an attic where Samara was kept by her father. Behind the wallpaper they discover an image of a tree seen on the tape, which grows near the Shelter Mountain Inn. At the inn, they discover a well underneath the floor, in which Rachel finds Samara's body, experiencing a vision of how her mother dropped her into it. Rachel notifies the authorities, and Samara is given a proper burial.
Rachel informs Aidan that they will no longer be troubled by Samara. However, Aidan is horrified, telling his mother she had freed her body, and that Samara never sleeps. In his apartment, Noah's TV turns on, revealing an image in which Samara crawls from the well, walks toward the screen and crawls out of the set into the room. Samara stares directly at him, and he backs away from her afraid, and she kills him, which Rachel discovers after racing to his apartment and seeing his face distorted like Katie's was. Upon returning to her apartment, Rachel destroys and burns the original tape screaming and asking what Samara wants from her. She soon notices the tape marked "COPY" underneath the couch. Afraid that Aidan will also die, Rachel realizes the only way to escape is to copy the tape and show it to someone else, continuing the cycle. The movie ends with Rachel helping Aidan to copy the tape and place it in a public library.
Cast
Reception
In order to advertise The Ring, many promotional websites were formed featuring the characters and places in the film. The film was financially successful; the box office gross actually increased from its 1st weekend to its 2nd, as the initial success led DreamWorks to roll the film into 700 additional theatres.[1] The Ring made $8.3 million in its first two weeks in Japan, compared to Ringu's $6.6 million total box-office gross.[2] The success of The Ring opened the way for American remakes of several other Japanese horror films, including The Grudge and Dark Water.[2] A sequel, The Ring Two, was released in North American theaters on March 18, 2005. It was directed by Hideo Nakata, the director of Ring.
The Ring received fairly positive reviews from film critics, receiving a “fresh” 72 percent favorable reviews out of 167 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes,[3] and a Metacritic score of 57/100 (mixed or average) from 36 reviews.[4] On the television program Ebert & Roeper, Richard Roeper gave the film "Thumbs Up" and said it was very gripping and scary despite some minor unanswered questions. Roger Ebert gave the film "Thumbs Down" and felt it was boring and "borderline ridiculous"; he also disliked the extended, detailed ending.[5] IGN’s Jeremy Conrad praised the movie for its atmospheric set up and cinematography, and said that “there are 'disturbing images'… but the film doesn't really rely on gore to deliver the scares. … The Ring relies on atmosphere and story to deliver the jumps, not someone being cleaved in half by a glass door.”[6] Film Threat Jim Agnew called it “dark, disturbing and original throughout. You know that you’re going to see something a little different than your usual studio crap.”[7] Verbinski was praised for slowly revealing the plot while keeping the audience interested, “the twists keep on coming, and Verbinski shows a fine-tuned gift for calibrating and manipulating viewer expectations.”[8]
Despite the praise given to Verbinski’s direction, critics railed the characters as being weak. The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaurn said that the film was “an utter waste of Watts… perhaps because the script didn’t bother to give her a character,”[9] whereas other critics such as William Arnold from Seattle Post-Intelligencer said the opposite: “she projects intelligence, determination and resourcefulness that carry the movie nicely.”[10] Many critics regarded Dorfman’s character as a "creepy-child" “Sixth Sense cliché.”[8] A large sum of critics, like Miami Herald’s Rene Rodriguez and USA Today’s Claudia Puig[11] found themselves confused and thought that by the end of the movie “[the plot] still doesn't make much sense.”[12] This movie was number 20 on the cable channel Bravo's list of the 100 Scariest Movie Moments.
See also
References
External links
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