A Horror Movie that Scares to Death

One of the many pleasures of Gore Verbinski's surprisingly creepy The Ring is watching Naomi Watts in her first big-budget Hollywood starring role. Watts is that rare performer who can effortlessly combine confidence with a deep vulnerability and win the audience's sympathy with the slightest of gestures. All the credit in the world must be given to David Lynch for rescuing such a talented and beautiful actress from almost total obscurity and giving her the opportunity of a lifetime with the pivotal dual role of Betty/Diane in his brilliant Mulholland Drive. With The Ring, Watts proves that she is the star Betty/Diane could only dream of becoming, and that she is here to stay for a long time.

The Ring is a remake of a hugely successful 1998 Japanese horror film of the same title, which was directed by Hideo Nakata and built around a delicious premise: immediately after you watch a particular videotape you receive a telephone call telling you that you will die in seven days, and when those days are up, you most certainly do. While I have not yet seen the original, I suspect that The Ring as directed by Verbinski (responsible for one of last year's most dreadful films--The Mexican), is not about to tarnish its memory en masse the way other recent Hollywood remakes of international hits, like Cameron Crowe's vanity project Vanilla Sky and Christopher Nolan's muddled and sterile Insomnia both have. The Ring goes against current horror film trends by taking itself seriously and for the most part succeeds in actually scaring its audience on several occasions.

The Ring begins with a scene that might at first give the viewer the wrong idea. As two frisky schoolgirls discuss the negative effects that watching television has on the brain one is bound to think that they have just walked into the latest teen horror movie. But the tone soon shifts when one of the girls is stalked through the house by an apparently supernatural being and then left dead in her room with her decomposed face frozen in an expression of absolute terror. Enter Rachel (Watts), the victim's aunt as well as an ambitious Seattle newspaper reporter and single mother. Initially skeptical of the videotape story until she discovers that three other teenagers also died exactly seven days after watching it, Rachel locates the tape at a mountain lodge and plays it on her cabin VCR.

When Rachel watches the film, which appears to be a Buñuel/Dali derivative with images of falling ladders and a woman jumping off a cliff to her death, the phone rings and she is given the seven-day warning. In no time Rachel has shown the tape to her video expert ex-boyfriend Noah (Martin Henderson) in hope of gaining answers as to where it could have come from. But the situation intensifies when her son (David Dorfman) happens to watch the video and more than her own survival becomes at stake. Rachel must race against the clock or else all three of them will die. As images from the video start mysteriously showing up in reality, Rachel follows her lead to a small island off the coast, which may hold the answers as to the tape's origins.

The makers of The Ring are aware that for this potentially ludicrous material to work an atmosphere must be created; a sense of the unknown must be maintained. Verbinski's primary strength is in using Seattle and its more rural surroundings to evocative effect. With his cinematographer Bojan Bazelli, Verbinski captures a rain-soaked, dreary environment shot through subtle green-tinted filters, and provides a number of standout images, such as an ominous red maple tree and a crazed horse plunging off the decks of a ferry boat. But Verbinski also has the tendency to overdo things. Besides revealing too much of the film's "monster" at the climax, Verbinski also relies too heavily on quick, loud insert shots to remind the viewer that a certain image echoes from the video throughout the film.

But none of these flaws are enough to derail the film. Ultimately, The Ring is a competently made horror film that makes up for gaps in narrative logic with stunning atmosphere and a charismatic lead performance by Naomi Watts.