The Ring and a ghost in the machine. Review on The Ring Movie

Much of Gore Verbinski’s The Ring appears to take place in the same anonymous city that was the threatening milieu of bloodshed in David Fincher’s classic Seven, so much so that I was almost surprised that journalist Rachel Keller didn’t, perchance by coincidence, bump into police inspectors’ Somerset and Mills; almost surprised. So similar are the atmospheres of both films that The Ring even goes so far as to adopt the seven day doom-countdown that was the foundation of Andrew Kevin Walker’s commonplace premise.The Ring is far from the magnificence of Seven but it holds to a nice pace on the trail of its predecessor(s) swapping the occasional banter between the detective Odd Couple for the stone-faced melancholia of an investigatory wonder-babe (Naomi Watts, sans the Mulholland Drive lesbianism, but just as phenomenal) opposite her depressed, precocious moppet son (surprisingly well played by David Dorfman.)

Some standard plot conventionalism dictates this cinematic function into a sometimes rote exercise but its unconventional study of tragedy and madness is a lavishly lucubrated exploration. Being based off a hit Japanese adaptation of Kôji Suzuki’s Ringu markets it as another rather avaricious Americanization of a foreign film too new too require a reconstruct. And aside from Ringu, the concept was explored earlier this year in William Malone’s ridiculous Fear Dot Com. That said and true, indubitably, The Ring is mesmerizing. A rousing masterwork from veteran commercial virtuoso Verbinski whose previous film work includes The Mexican, the oft-underrated Mouse Hunt, and was partly (but wisely went unaccredited) responsible for the abominable crap-fest The Time Machine. With The Ring Verbinski doesn’t quite generate the personal passion piece of his career, which is quite a shame, but rather an art house-horror film in the spotlight of the mainstream and orchestrates The Ring into a sumptuous retelling, as misbegotten as it may be.

What was made a cartoonish and needlessly convoluted tale about true-apocryphal legends in Fear Dot Com is redeemed to diabolical heights, and though the brainlessness is still nearly intact, things look and feel much better. The Ring is an endlessly grim vision of stone and precipitation fusions, an apocalyptic journey into dark cerebral waters of bridging the apparitional and the technological, not becoming the lethargic tale with a gorgeous exterior one may expect. Accruals of music video mayhem poised against depressing, azure lighting, with vivid cinematic composure, accredit the photography as no less than first rate. In place of Fear Dot Com’s ludicrously hideous, off-putting but occasionally enrapturing moody set work, The Ring elegantly indulges in disconnected detachment and its disillusioned baggage while heartedly engaging the dank atmosphere as an essential component.

Opening in Scream mode, which introduces the urban legend of a deadly video cassette that kills its viewers after seven days, we see the results in a teenage girl’s grisly and bizarre demise. Rachel Keller (Watts), the aunt of the mysteriously expired girl, vows to the mother (her sister) to use her journalist position and skills to investigate the inexplicable death. Using rumors of the tape and a set of photos Rachel discovers that her niece viewed the mythical tape at a secluded mountainous, cabin get-a-way with some friends. Along the dismal path Rachel segues into the inevitable and watches the tape herself, which plays like a NIN music video and features unutterable murkiness despite it being described as a typical product by a “film school” student, and Rachel realizes its ominous ramifications, warned against her, are real.

The Ring takes the tired absorption of contemporary technology with fantastical elements but doesn’t bother to dote on the more exasperating or unrealistic facets, rather it keenly focuses on the horror and depression of the foreground’s mood. Though, I am beginning to tire of utterly illogical and unexplained wraithlike inventions (i.e. how the tape was made is never actually discussed), which may infuriate The Ring’s most unsuspecting viewers. This requires some belief in the paranormal and the supernaturally transcendental, yet ingeniously the atypical conclusion redeems most flaws. And that the film makes interesting use of subliminal images, and emphasizes that the background (which is rather rare) meet the foreground with decadent results, advocates its attractive extravagance.

The Ring is also something of a frightening stir; like Signs, it uses more than simple “sound effect screeches and jump” tactics but conceives and conjures an outlandish death march through a hall of invisible horror. Vindictive malevolence, that’s alarmingly appealing as opposed to the incredulous and inaccessible revenge-of-the-dead-whore theme in Fear Dot Com, incites the cold facelessness of looming fatality in a supreme, though derivative, utilization of the “clock” script device. Beautifully arresting a ferocious visualization of ghostly sadism and hoarsely translating it into an eccentric context (script by Ehren Kruger), it reveals issues in parental dysfunctions and the delusions of madness and disappointment’s burden. Though any character dynamics are almost purely coincidental in The Ring, it still makes gallant attempts by introducing the tape’s origins as something to do with a barmy, suicidal horse farmer (the always superb Brian Cox) and recollections of his once-revered wife, but now notorious for her insanity.

I may be going on another unwarranted rant but I’m really distrusting films these days that ardently employ pristine, precious little girls to appear in doll-form and forebodingly warn protagonists about imminent annihilation, scare them, or simply hover about creepily. Fortunately The Ring doesn’t fall much into that trap; true it does feature the image of a suspicious-looking little girl but it dresses the female in Satan’s little-miss-pretty outfit, much like The Exorcist’s possessed opponent, with a torn visage and decayed flesh. The actual appearance of the evil is a little bit of a disappointment, again like Signs in its unveiling of the extraterrestrial, because hidden forces of evil prove to be much more effective in constructing fear, however, Verbinski considers it with more shock value rather than an effortless unveiling ceremony via CGI.