Starring: Naomi Watts, David Dorfman, Sissy Spacek, Simon Baker, Elizabeth Perkins, Kelly Stables
Director: Hideo Nakata
Rated: M15+
AUDIENCES are used to the recycling of classic American movies, as well as Hollywood remakes of successful foreign films such as La Cage Aux Folles (The Birdcage), and the milking of popular films through sequels. The Ring 1 and 2 are the latest American films to join this trend, being remakes of the globally popular Japanese horror films Ringus 1 and 2, which were directed by Hideo Nakata from Koji Suzuki’s novel.
Directed by Gore Verbinski in 2002, The Ring starred Australia’s Naomi Watts as Rachel Keller, a newspaper reporter and the mother of a young son, Aidan (David Dorfman), who tries to stop the vengeful spirit of a dead girl escaping from a videotape that has the power to kill anyone who views its surreal, seemingly unrelated sequence of images.
Despite being heavily rewritten for American audiences, The Ring was a psychologically chilling thriller, and its sequel which has virtually the same plot, offers more of the same for audiences who can’t get enough of this new, culturally hybrid genre.
At the end of the American Ring, Rachel burns both the original tape and a copy to prevent Samara channelling herself into the world again.
The Ring 2 begins six months later when Rachel (Watts) relocates with Aidan (Dorfman) to a small town in Oregon.
In an attempt to build a new life for herself and her still traumatised son, Rachel is working again on a local newspaper and Aidan begins at a new school.
However, evidence emerges that the tape has replicated itself, and Samara materialises, invading Rachel’s and Aidan’s consciousness and causing a number of deaths before she is stopped, this time with help from Max (Australia’s Simon Baker, The Guardian), Rachel’s fellow reporter and a potential love interest.
The Ring 2 has some laughable moments — the sudden materialisation of a hypodermic needle with a will of its own, a corpse jumping out of a body bag, and a clumsy computer-generated herd of rampant reindeer.
But Hideo Nakata, directing his first Hollywood film, manages to imbue the story with genuine imagination, imparting a Japanese sensibility to both the film’s visual look and the pop-psychology underlying the mystery of Samara’s death.
It is easy to spot what is derivative about The Ring 2. It depends on menace (The Blair Witch Project), ghosts (The Amityville Horror, The Sixth Sense) and fears and fantasies about being taken over by others (The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Village of the Damned, Alien, The Exorcist, Constantine … the list could go on).
But Nakata succeeds in part, and a film like Constantine fails, because Nakata relies primarily on the power of suggestion.
While Constantine labours to make the spiritual concrete, The Ring 2 shows with greater psychological reality the collapse of the boundary between what is ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ when something like psychosis takes over.
