See, it's all right to be frightened in the movies. It's when you're frightened pumping gas that the world has been turned upside down.
That's why it's an ironically propitious time for the arrival of "The Ring," the creepiest, clammiest, twitchiest squealfest in months. It offers, among its many pleasures, the happiness of safe fear. You breathe hard, you gasp, you look away, and nothing real has died.
Naomi Watts realizes too late that watching a mysterious video could be deadly in "The Ring."
(Dreamworks)
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It's also a showcase for the young Aussie powerhouse Naomi Watts, last seen stunning the world in a double performance (opposite characters, even!) in David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive." In "The Ring," she's on-screen for close to two hours, her Australian accent subsumed in the total Americanness of her character (why is it so easy for Aussies to pass as Yank and not the other way around?), and she's never less than compelling.
The movie, adapted from an I'll-bet-even-scarier 1998 Japanese cult item ("Ringu," by Hideo Nakata), is one of those creepers about an urban legend. The legend in question is the "death tape." It also plays with the "evil child" theme as well, when it's not harking back to Salvador Dali's "An Andalusian Dog." So it's a basketful of recondite sensations!
You all know what a death tape is, as opposed to a snuff movie. You pop it into a VCR – and from that moment on, you're doomed. Somehow its rays reach out and scramble your genes and notify your heart to close down in seven days. The movie opens with an episode in which a couple of teenage pals titillate each other about the possibility of such an occurrence, though it happens that one of them actually has seen what is purported to be the real thing.
This sequence plays adroitly with the imagery and traditions of the conventional slasher film – pretty girls alone in the bedroom in their underwear, becoming more and more terrified of what lurks about; doors opening and closing; shadowy images behind translucent glass; the squishy friction of bare feet on wood floors; and one of those soundtracks in which each vibration has its own special pitch and tenor. It's pretty much a blueprint for the method of the film, which is consummate manipulation of images that are disturbing via the application of incredibly supple, suggestive editing and music, all culminating in something you don't quite get or didn't quite see, although your heart is going bumpa-bumpa at 7 million beats a second.
The director, the heretofore undistinguished advertising vet Gore ("The Mexican") Verbinski, understands that fear is better in the mind than carnage is on the screen and that the prelude to fear is a sense of increasing unease. Thus he unspools his tale with an almost stately visual craft – it has the big-movie, DreamWorks look of Importance and Taste – that emphasizes the subconsciously unpleasant as opposed to the gross. The ideas are scary, the images unsettling, particularly as they take place in what might be called the landscape of nightmare. That takes imagination; it doesn't take much imagination to cut somebody's throat and watch the blood gurgle and coagulate, or to show a fool in a hockey mask with a buzz saw.
Watts plays Rachel Keller, a work-obsessed reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who is an indifferent mom to her grave, ultra-realist little boy Aidan (David Dorfman, next week's Haley Joel Osment). It turns out that Rachel is a cousin of the teenager who saw the video and suffered the consequences, and so, using her journalist's skills, she begins to investigate.
The movie itself is fundamentally structured as an investigation, but it has this ante-upper of a twist. Early on, Rebecca sees the death tape (so do we; it resembles the aforementioned "Andalusian Dog," a skein of truly disturbing images constructed to reach you from the eyes straight to the deep brain, without stopping at the rational regions of the outer brain). So, if the legend is true, she has an ever-diminishing supply of time and an ever-increasing sense of urgency.
Her partner in the investigation is her ex-lover (and presumably Aidan's father), Noah, who is helpfully a photo and tape geek, so he is able to provide extreme assistance. I do not like him, though why I cannot tell. Oh yes, I can. It's pure looks. The actor is Martin Henderson, who has some of the facial characteristics of too many other horrible Hollywood actors. That is truly scary. Sometimes he looks like Bill Pullman and sometimes like Ed Burns and sometimes like Josh Hartnett. Is it possible he's a "Simone"-style fabrication, somebody's superb program?
They decode the video, then link its imagery to eerie happenings on an island off Washington state and go there. It all tracks back to a tragic situation of some years earlier, when a childless couple at last acquired a child (we know not how) who seems to have been pure devil-spawn: She made terrible things happen and was ultimately put in a home, but not before a kind of blight settled on the island and all possibilities and hopes turned sour.
At the same time, it's clear that Aidan has some weird back channel to the problem child; he's in communication with her, and he expresses her thoughts and hopes through his own drawings and through his sense of the world as a site of tragedy.
Does any of this make any sense? Well, if you believe in such things, it will. But if you don't, it will, too. That is to say: I don't believe, not for a moment, not ever, not no how – yet so beguiling is the filmcraft of "The Ring," so haunting are its images, so queasy its ending, it had me from start to finish.
THE RING (PG-13, 115 minutes) – Contains deeply disturbing imagery and is far too intense for younger children, even with adult supervision. At area theaters.
