The Ring (2002)
Director: Gore Verbinski
Had I seen this before: Yes
The Ring is a 2002 American remake of a 1998 Japanese horror movie about a very creepy VHS tape that wants to kill you. You, specifically. I mean, also me. This tape is pretty indiscriminate, it's really a chain-letter sort of deal. Anyway, this means The Ring deserves most of the credit for ushering in the J-horror trend in the U.S. and also the blame for the many inferior knockoffs that followed. I recently watched The Cabin in the Woods with the 13-year-old and didn't have to explain very many of the references, but when they threw to the situation in Japan, I was like "ah, right--J-horror has a lot of spirits and creepy children and everything is sort of bluish green," which I now realize was just me describing this movie specifically, despite having seen many actual Japanese films in the intervening years. It makes an impression, is what I'm saying.
We open with one of my favorite things, which is: a gimmick. The FBI warning glitches, everything glitches, we're entering a theme park and the theme is glitchy tech. Two high school girls are chatting and watching TV and the conversation turns to an urban legend going around about a cursed tape that kills you seven days after you watch it. One of the girls confesses that she did see a tape like that..................seven days ago!!!!! Oh no! It was at this point that I gently warned Anna that Amber Tamblyn was not going to be a Final Girl and she said "No, she is a what's-her-name from Scream." I did not point out that Amber Tamblyn in 2002 was nowhere near as famous as Drew Barrymore in 1996 and therefore it is an imperfect comparison because the audience expectations are very different in those two instances, but rather said "Yes, she's a Casey." Sorry, I know it's annoying when people low-key brag about their parenting.
At any rate, Amber Tamblyn gets good and Casey'd but we don't really see what happens--one of the things I appreciate about this movie is how it selectively hides the ball from the audience and then BAM whips the ball right at your face when you aren't expecting it. For the most part it is a pretty standard modern mainstream horror movie with a lot of familiar beats, but it does subvert expectations a couple of times in the way it tells the story. In this case, you escape that opening scene thinking "well that wasn't so bad" because everything scary was implied rather than shown, and then a couple of scenes later in the middle of what feels like a very safe, daytime scene between two characters talking in a kitchen you get a quick flashback to what Amber Tamblyn's corpse looked like when they discovered her and it is straight up horrifying. My guard? Well, it sure was down. So kudos to Gore Verbinski for that one.
Cursed tape established, we meet our main characters, Rachel (played by Naomi Watts) and the young son she displays absolutely zero interest in parenting, Aidan. Turns out Amber Tamblyn was Aidan's cousin and they were very close and he's having a tough time. Rachel does not seem particularly concerned about this or about the tragic and inexplicable death of her 16-year-old niece but she is very intrigued when some teens at the funeral describe the cursed tape rumor, because she is...........an investigative journalist!!!!! She excitedly tells her editor "I'm cooking up too good a story" with absolutely no hint of grief for her extremely dead niece at the center of it. This is because work is her life and Aidan is just her sad little burden who distresses his teacher with his death-related drawings and makes his own lunch and walks himself to school and, spoiler, selects his own filmed entertainment because no one is ever supervising him.
Rachel watches the tape. It is basically the scary boat ride scene from Willy Wonka but in black and white. She enlists the help of her ex, Noah, another hot person who absolutely does not want to be a parent, which is a shame because he is Aidan's father. They spend so much time together not parenting their shared eight-year-old. At least we see at one point that Aidan has a babysitter, who reports that he was very good and easy to take care of, like, maybe you should try it sometime, Rachel or Noah. They can't though, because they are busy investigating. Eventually Aidan watches a copy of the tape that Rachel brought home and just left sitting there for him I guess. She pays some lip service to the fact that she's really gotta figure this thing out now that her kid is in danger, but I gotta say, you do not really see the hustle on the screen.
Several horror tropes come at you pretty fast: people affected by the tape show up blurry in photos and security cameras; multiple people have nosebleeds that indicate, I dunno, something scary; a patient in a mental institution is cryptic rather than helpful; animals act strangely. At one point Rachel is on a ferry and tries to pet a horse (?) that is also riding the ferry (?) and the horse is like "no thank you" but she keeps trying for reasons that I absolutely do not understand. When a horse says no, it means no, Rachel! So she's shushing it and shushing it and still trying to touch it and eventually it fully loses its mind, breaks out of its little cage, jumps off the dang ferry, and gets chopped up by the propellers. It's a genuinely shocking and awful scene and also is 100% Rachel's fault.
Eventually the pieces of the puzzle start coming together and it is a satisfying sort of mystery with nicely creepy clues. The fact that they have this physical object--a tape--and a bunch of equipment to science it with is pretty great. I'm not going to explain everything that happens in the back half because despite my personal reservations about the character of Rachel as a human I do recommend that you watch this if you haven't seen it. But I will say there is a terrific rug pull near the end of the film that elevates it above a lot of other things in the genre--this movie basically lulls you into thinking you're at the happy ending and then puts all of its actual scary shit after that. Respect.
Line I repeated quietly to myself: "I'm sure it's a lot scarier at night."
Is it under two hours: Yes
Thing that I will now be avoiding, for safety: Low-rise jeans
Simply Sandwich Bread with Peanut Butter and Jelly from Simply Recipes
No one in this movie eats anything (except that one horse who ate some ferry propeller sorry sorry sorry it really did upset me so much) but as mentioned above we do watch Aidan the parentless child make and pack his own little lunch complete with peanut butter and jelly on white bread.
Up next: A rousing 1940s game of Cursed or Neurotic?