eenage girls Tomoko (Takeuchi) and Masami (Sato), instead of doing homework one night, talk about a creepy urban legend. According to the story, some little kid tried to videotape a show while on vacation on the Izu Peninsula. The tape, tuned to a dead channel on the peninsula, should have recorded nothing but static. But a scary woman came on the screen, pointed at the kid and told him he would die in one week. Just after seeing the tape, the kid got a menacing phone call ... and the kid
did die a week later. The story frightens Tomoko, who tells Masami that she saw a creepy video exactly a week ago. The phone rings. ...
Tomoko's aunt, Reiko Asakawa (Matsushima), an investigative journalist, is doing a feature on an urban legend about a haunted videotape that kills all who watch it. While interviewing Tokyo middle-school girls about the legend, she hears about a high-school girl who had seen the tape and who later died with her boyfriend while parked in a car. Reiko prepares for the funeral of her niece, who has died suddenly and mysteriously a few days before. While attending Tomoko's funeral with her son, Yoichi (Otaka), Reiko senses something is not quite right. She discovers a possible connection between Tomoko and the couple who died in the car. A number of young, healthy people have inexplicably died. Her investigation leads her to a cabin on the Izu Peninsula. She finds an unmarked video tape. Soon after her discovery, the phone rings.
Enlisting the aid of university professor Ryuji Takayama (Sanada), a man with an unusual and shadowy past, Reiko tries to solve the mystery of the tape before her last week of life runs out.
At last, the ominous original
The Ring, DreamWorks' hit of Fall 2002 (which earned more than $130 million), and 1998's Ringu tell the same story. But so do West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet; context and execution make worlds of difference. While Gore Verbinski's The Ring covers some of, but not all, the same thematic territory as
Nakata's Ringu, there's a very different aesthetic to Ringu—one fans of the remake, and those who weren't crazy about it, can both find rewarding.
Ringu is a dreadful movie—that is, it is literally full of dread. Nakata's greatest gift is his ability to make supernatural doom seem matter-of-fact. The notion of a haunted videotape is absurd. How that notion plays out is even more absurd. Yet Ringu is urgently believable—in terms of how the story unfolds and emotionally. A movie dealing with the potentially dreamlike nature of media like videotape has an edge when it comes to subverting what feels real. When otherworldly things manifest themselves through media, the film itself becomes part of the scares, the way a campfire setting becomes part of the scares of a ghost story. The almost Lovecraftian backstory of the haunted videotape isn't some distant nugget in an ancient tome—it's tangible as an urban legend heard on any streetcorner.
DreamWorks Home Entertainment has done a spectacular job of transferring Ringu. For those in North America who have only seen Ringu before on muddy bootlegs, this new release is a revelation. Kenji Kawai's score is dentist-drill unnerving in Dolby, as are a number of the film's creepier sound effects. The eponymous "ring" sounds ominous as the fall of a guillotine blade. For a lot of fans, this new transfer might be like seeing Ringu for the first time.
