Chilling and beautiful

Rating: 9/10 (27 October 2015)

Gore Verbinski's The Ring is a commendable effort of chilly atmospherics and bleak grey cinematography, with a nice central performance by Naomi Watts. Before I get scolded for giving this airtime when it's based on a Japanese fright flick, I've seen that one and I think this is the stronger film (same goes for The Grudge). It's just got such a personality all its own. Watts plays Rachel, a journalist who stumbles on an eerie mystery after a suspicious death in the family. She's led to a videotape containing stark, disturbing black and white images, a video tape that's purported to kill you in seven days upon watching it. She, of course, watches it, spurring on a delirious search for the truth behind it before it's too late. She's led from dreary, rain streaked Seattle to a remote horse farm on an island off the coast, the adopted home of a strange little girl with some vaguely terrifying abilities named Samara (Daveigh Chase, also Donnie Darko's little sister and Lilo from Lilo and Stitch). Underrated Martin Henderson plays a colleague who helps her out in the investigation, and creepy little David Dorfman is her strange kid. Brian Cox, as Samara's adopted father, walks away with his segment of the film, giving him fierce heartbreak and fear. Heart stopping secrets are unleashed, and the threatening presence grows and follows Rachel. I like that the film never really clarifies exactly what is wrong with Samara, just makes it very clear that it's something very wrong, which for me is much scarier than spelling it out in bland exposition. There's some skin crawling moments in this one, mostly iconic now, but I won't ruin it for anyone who hasn't seen it and will say no more than the sequences involving a well, a television and of course the omnipresent video tape are highlights. It all looks fantastic too, the colours absent in favour of a suffocating monochromatic tone, punctuated occasionally by gasping breaths of red in the fall colours at the motel she visits, and a few other moments of brief vibrance among the gloom. A true fright flick that takes its time, ratchets up a slow, mounting fear, and releases it in short bursts of stinging shock moments, bridged by lapses of pure atmosphere.