A truly brilliant and gripping film.

Rating: 9/10 (2 April 2008)

The Ring is a brilliant and gripping film which thriller fans will adore.
The story begins after Rachel Keller's (Naomi Watts) niece is found dead, with no explanation for the death. It would appear that her heart just stopped. But the girl's mother asks Rachel, who is a journalist, to try and figure out why she really died. What Rachel discovers is that her niece, along with the three other friends of hers, watched a video tape exactly seven days prior to when they all died simultaneously.
The Ring has a rating of MA15+, and it earned it. This is a very scary film that will have you on tenterhooks the whole way through its many twists and turns, but is not exceptionally gory, nor are things jumping out at the central characters every few minutes. The film is scary because of the creepy way it goes about things, letting you only have another piece of the puzzle that Rachel is presented. But the frightening imagery that the film uses makes it creepier then the story would have been. The scenes that stay with you especially are Rachel's encounter with a horse, her final meeting with Richard Morgan, the owner of a horse ranch on Moesko Island, and the gripping finale.
But, the powerful imagery doesn't only come in the forms of scares. Certain scenes, like one simple scene where Rachel stands on her apartment's balcony and looks out at other people's lives gives us a snapshot into other people's lives, just showing that everyone you see has a tale to tell, something different from the last, and that people always have secrets.
This film for me doesn't come under the "horror" category, but rather the "thriller" category, even though it is a very frightening piece of cinema. It is a classic, and even though it's a very scary piece of film, it's easily recommendable.