April 14, 2003

The Ring

(This post will be largely spoiler-free.) I managed to miss seeing The Ring when it was in theaters last fall; our annuanl Thanksgiving host Beth was interested in seeing it, but due to fears of Black Friday crowds, we didn't make it to the mall. The Ring is a movie that will inherently be different when you see it on video. As the first five minutes of the movie reveal, The Ring is about a videotape out of an urban legend: you see a woman's nightmare and seven days later you die. The movie is surprisingly well-executed; nobody behaves stupidly, given that they aren't aware that they're in a horror movie. I guessed the twist ending, mostly, but it doesn't seem to be in there just for the sake of having it. The Ring isn't particularly horrifying, but even the best horror movies (The Exorcist, The Haunting) aren't horrifying; thinking about it, the only thing that really strikes me as properly horrific that can be carried off in film is a slow descent into madness (and I'm thinking Repulsion, not The Shining). The death video in The Ring is well done, slightly reminiscent of Un Chien Andalusia, and here's where the experience is changed by seeing it on video; I watched the sequence in which the video is first shown two or three times, totally disrupting the flow of the film and turning it into something closer to a game. V. and I tried to figure out what each of the images meant and where they fit into the narrative. I liked the effect, but it probably wrecked the slow buildup of tension that's crucial for this kind of movie. But even if it didn't leave me shuddering with terror, it was appropriately creepy, somewhere on the level of a really good episode of The X-Files or Twin Peaks. The one really masterful moment was the denoument (which I hear is even better in the Japanese version), which was wonderfully filmic; things seemed to be running at the wrong speed, as in a silent movie, and there was a great, herky-jerky Harryhausen-esque motion to it that worked as a horrifying effect in itself. The more traditional special effects, the body makeup and such, in that scene actually distracted from the spookiness. Getting the character's movements to be so unheimlich must have taken some effort, but it was a transcendant effect, the only truly otherworldly moment in an otherwise enjoyably competent movie.

posted at 8:58 AM | 1 comments

(video)