forget the plot holes, this is an instant-classic chiller

Rating: 10/10 (25 October 2002)

The Ring is not a horror movie or even a thriller. This is definitely a "chiller," an emerging genre which seems to be blossoming after the success of The Blair Witch Project. Like other movies of it's ilk, it combines the sometimes sickening fright value of horror movies with the thrillers' unique way of packing a suspenseful detective story into a ticking-clock ("i hope they make it...i hope the make it...").
It's a distinctly non-Hollywood kind of filmmaking, I can't think of any of the popular chillers of the past few years that has been particularly satisfying for an American audience so used to nice, neat endings. The one that came closest to tying everything up, The Sixth Sense, is also the most celebrated, interestingly enough.
Yes, a lot goes answered at the end -- some of it is deliberately ambiguous, some of it begs questions that actually SHOULD have been answered, and a lot of it can't make any sense. This movie's biggest flaw is asking questions that it never even attempts to address, let alone answer.
But plot is not the strength of this film. It's strength is an impending sense of dread -- the waiting for the horror to happen -- and this movie is so great for making you feel that dread almost constantly. There are great stretches in the film when nearly nothing "scary" in the traditional sense happens, but looking around in the theater at all the covered faces, you would think somebody was getting knocked-off every three minutes.

Kudos to the director and the cinematographer Bozen Bazelli for creating what I think is the most visually-arresting movie since Requiem for a Dream. I recently saw a preview of the director's upcoming project Butterfly, which, despite being a science-fiction melodrama, is just as hard on an audience as The Ring. It's what you see and how it is shot that frightens you, rather than you what know. Zimmerman's score is incredible -- I just bought it today, and I saw the movie last night.
There's nothing here to challenge last summer's The Others as the best of the new chillers, neither will this film keep you up at night (like Blair Witch did if you saw it before the hoax was exposed). But it is a feast for the senses, and well-worth the money, which is true of few movies these days. Ignore the plot holes, and just LOOK.