A masterful command of film directing turns a silly premise into a incredibly effective horror

Rating: 8/10 (29 November 2019)

To get it out of the way: a killer videotape is objectively, a little ridiculous, and on the surface not a very frightening idea at all. For skeptics, especially horror skeptics, it would be tempting to write the film off for this reason alone. I would seriously urge you not to.
What makes this film so effective is that it utilises atmosphere to entertain fear. The audience is not subject to regular, predictable jump scares. There isn't a character dying every 15 minutes. Yet you are kept in a permanent, undulating state of tension throughout because of how cleverly the film has set everything up.
It achieves this in a variety of ways: the ever-present blue filter, the near-absence of music, the intertitle cards for each day of the week, progressively pulling us closer and closer to... we don't even know for sure. And last, the opening -- this is something a lot of horror films try to do, but in the majority of cases fail to execute as well: open the film with an incredibly suspenseful and ultimately terrifying 10 minutes, as way of locking the audience into a state of fear -- a state where the movie has showed them what it can do, and what do expect. A brilliant and sparingly used jump-scare is also delivered at the start, but rather than being predictable, it comes out of nowhere.
What effect does this have? For the rest of the film, you are afraid of what'll happen next. The film barely needs to do anything at all, it only needs to suggest 'enough' -- you, the audience member, will create the fear for yourself. For instance, by virtue of the original jump scare coming out of nowhere, the audience is on constant alert for one even when the film doesn't look like it is leading there.
In other words, this film very successfully adopts the 'less is more'. We get scared in the dark not because the dark is actively scaring us, but because our brains are projecting frightening thoughts onto it -- The Ring operates in the same way.
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A point of contention: this vs the original. It seems that people generally prefer the version they see first. I personally think this is a rare case of the remake surpassing the original. The remake is more polished and controlled. Some will say this absence of grittiness lessens the scare, I disagree. To me the difference here is like one between a student film and a professional remake of the same thing. Mostly comes down to taste though, and which you saw first.