RATING
Out of 100 |
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82
|
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| COLD ANALYSIS |
| 3.5 -ATMOSPHERE |
| 2.0 -GORE |
| 1.25 -HUMOR |
| 2.5 -SCARES |
| 3.25 -TENSION |
Fear of the ordinary is an interesting concept. While most people know that there's nothing lurking at the end of a shadowed upstairs hallway or slobbering underneath our beds, the introduction of mild disturbances like that into our ordinary lives is disconcerting. And it's the source of a great deal of supernatural fiction; how many movies are about a haunted mirror, book, or house? Stephen King's entire body of work revolves around the affect of extraordinarily frightening circumstances on normal people. Even the consistent sales of Ouija boards suggests that a part of us craves the intrusion of the unknown into our lives, even as our rational minds try to fend against it.
This is where The Ring comes in. Its entire purpose is to establish a normal world, then to corrupt our concept of what exists in that world. To that end, we're presented with characters who are understandable people. They have histories, emotional connections, faults, ambitions. They're trying to live through the normal misfortunes life throws at them and as a result are completely unprepared when something unprecedented comes along. And how does this intrusion happen? It's not a gateway from another world, not a gibbering monster, not even a ghost rattling chains in the attic.
It's a videotape, and what's more normal than that? The worst they can do is disturb you, whether it be with Faces of Death or Celine Dion, whatever sinks your boat. In our reality, whatever's on that TV screen stays there.
Not so here. The video in The Ring is an insidious piece of media, and as is methodically revealed in the movie's detailed background, it has some very good reasons for being so. The film's tension mounts measuredly, gaining momentum and sense, until it climaxes in a plot twist that is far from being contrived; rather, it flows from the plot and the audience's expectations and results in a profoundly disturbing but logical ending.
The citicism one of my friends leveled against The Ring is that is just wasn't scary. That seemed to me less an indictment of the movie than of the mentality of a lot of people who watched it. Director Gore Verbinski and writer Ehren Krueger (running rings around his Scream 3 script) are interested in putting a postmodern spin on an old idea of horror moviemaking: drawing fright from slow-burning atmosphere. The Ring nourishes the icy potential of long hallways and cold lighting, creating an atmosphere of dread that's only occasionally accented by a scare. But what scares they are--jolting directing from Verbinski and amazing makeup design from Rick Baker make each scare a thrusting, horrifying vision. Because they reveal a world outside of our own, spitting with hate and vengeance, the frights in The Ring are a violation that was powerful enough to stay with me for days thereafter.
