Thrilling, but doesn't resolve the issues it addresses

Rating: 6/10 (11 November 2013)

The Ring is a horror movie about a video that kills people. If you watch it, you will experience hallucinations for seven days, and then die mysteriously. The movie's protagonist, a single mother named Rachel, watches the movie in the hopes of finding out what caused the death of her niece; but Rachel soon realizes that she is going to be the movie's next victim.
In The Ring, we find that the video was created by a girl named Samara, an adopted child whose origins are never explained, much like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. But, while Bronte's novel shows Heathcliff's demented psyche to be the result of much harsh treatment at the hands of his adopted family, this movie shows precisely no explanation for how Samara came to be the satanic, sadistic child that the movie reveals her to be. She was adopted by a couple who wanted a child. Was this girl the creation of witches, or goblins, or Satan himself? There are hints that she is an aberration upon nature itself: her presence causes horses to go mad and pitch themselves into the ocean. Similarly, in Macbeth, the title character causes nature to go awry because, by murdering the king and taking his place, he has interrupted the great chain of being. But Samara, as far as we know, has committed no act that violates nature. She simply is a violation of nature, was born a violation of nature. Either that, or her adopted parents were extremely cruel to her, but nowhere in the movie is there evidence of such cruelty.
The movie is a fantasy – televisions turn on by themselves; people's images are distorted in photographs; a mysterious phone call informs Rachel, moments after she watches the movie, that she has "seven days" to live (couldn't she do *69 or something to determine the source of the call?). Yet it also does a remarkable job of imitating a detective story. One by one, the odd images of the videotape are all explained by what Rachel sees in her research. Unfortunately, her research never does more than lap the surface.
How, for instance, did Samara create this videotape in the first place? How did she distribute it? Why does she attack people whom she does not even know? The ready answer is, "She is evil, it is her duty to do evil deeds." Rachel's ex-boyfriend Noah remarks, upon examining the videotape, that it does not read like a normal tape and that its lack of a proper imprint is like a person being "born without fingerprints." That captures Samara to a T: she has no fingerprints. She came from nowhere, she returned to the nowhere, and she insists on dragging people with her retroactively.
Samara has no remarkable effect upon anyone's personality. She has nothing to say about the real world, or how people ought to live their lives. For all practical purposes Samara is not a person at all, but simply a monster whose form happens to be that of young girl. Rachel knows she will not bring her niece back from the dead; she watches the videotape out of curiosity, and love for her niece. Five minutes after she has watched the tape, the niece is as good as forgotten, because Rachel must protect her own life. She investigates for the sake of survival, and because the story behind the tape is, I must admit, moderately engaging and it arouses her curiosity. But we watch because the evil of Samara terrifies us. Ignorance has always been the chief source of fear: the less comprehensible the object, the more powerful the fear it inspires.
This focus on the concept of fear lends itself to the fact that the movie is, in the end, about a videotape. Most people in the world have little or no idea how a videotape actually works. You pop it in the VCR, and the movie starts; you neither know nor care what happens inside of the VCR. It is only the image on the television – the surface, not the depth – that matters. In our modern world of information technology, we are farther and farther distanced from the inner workings of the mechanisms that daily serve us. We want only the images, not the wires and sparks within. And so this movie asks the question, "What happens when a videotape is possessed by a fantastical spirit? What kind of repairman do you call for that? He'd be just as confused as anyone else."
The Ring contains no redemption, or morality; it is horror for the sake of horror. Needless to say it is not the first of its kind; but it is a half-hearted attempt to be something more. My problem with The Ring is not even that the movie raises questions and fails to answer them – the questions themselves are never formed or articulated. Throughout the movie there is a loosely visited theme of families staying together, but neither Samara's family nor Rachel's family obtains the unity it deserves. "How can we live without any love?" Rachel's son Aidan seems to ask of the audience. Aidan alone seems determined to coexist with Samara, to live within the bizarre parameters that she has set. They are parameters we can neither see nor chart, but they are there, and Samara has provided a way to survive if you can figure out the route.
There is no "ring" in The Ring; the title refers to something different, although you might figure it out before I did. Relationships between people end unhappily in this movie, but the evil of the videotape runs uninterrupted. Samara is, somehow, the absolute, and when the movie finishes her hold on the world has not been weakened. And although Rachel solves the mystery of Samara's effect on her adopted parents, Samara's origins remain a mystery, and the filmmaker shows no interest in solving this other, deeper mystery.