The Ring

What’s the Story?

In this remake of a Japanese horror film based on a series of books, urban legend meets scary movie reality when four teens die, as predicted, exactly seven days to the minute from when they watched an unmarked video in a remote mountain cabin. Rachel (Naomi Watts), the aunt of one of the teenagers, is a savvy and skeptical journalist whose curiosity is sparked by tales of the tape. After finding and watching the source of the mystery, she receives a phone call announcing that she has seven days. From there, it is a race to solve the clues and answer the riddle of the video, with the stakes greatly raised when two of the people closest to her, including her young son, watch the deadly tape.

Is It Any Good?

Director Gore Verbinski does an excellent job of letting our imaginations find portent and peril in the most mundane of actions, such as picking up groceries at the local corner store. Watts is a relief as she plays through the gamut of Rachel's emotions with truly credible, but not overwrought, gusto. While the adults are busy solving the riddle of the tape, the heart-stopping dyad of the Ring's children usher in the deeper dimension of fear. Rachel's son, Aiden (a stony-eyed David Dorfman) is the medium and interpreter for the terrifying Samara (Daveigh Chase), who is at the heart of the mystery.

THE RING dips deep in the well of oft-used scary images, which paradoxically results in a movie that is both architecturally firm but--with little new to add--empty of true revelation.