REVIEW: Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998)

I wish I could rewind to before Bong Joon-Ho made his river monster.  Before Kim Ji-Woon told a tale of two sisters.  Before Kurosawa produced stories about doppelgangers and end-times.  Before that seriously misguided audition and before the town full of sickly spirals.  Because before all of that, there was Ringu.  Watching it fourteen years after its attack on horror convention is a bit like watching Halloween after enduring the slasher craze of the eighties.  The skill is easy to see.  The originality?  The freshness?  Irretrievable.  The concept lost to the years of knockoffs and sequels and remakes, the details roaming free in the public consciousness.  I can only imagine the joy American fans felt upon release.  Getting hold of the movie must've felt like they were finding the ring video itself.

What remains after all these years?  Something familiar to fans of "Asian Wave" horror: Ringu is a preposterous plot wrapped in craft so strong that what would be critical flaws in other horror films feel like nitpicks.  For example, the shocking speed with which the heroine Reiko (Nanako Matsushima) views a video tape that may hold a death-curse.  And how quickly she gets her ex-husband Ryuji (Hiroyuki Sanada) to watch the death-curse tape.  Why are these people so casual about death-curses?  Also, think of how a late-film trip to the tape's source ends up having no significant impact on the story - oh, it fleshes out the history, but a later twist reveals it as an over-inflated red herring.  Reiko and Ryuji learn the hard way that sometimes the answer is right in front of you, on a bright white sticker.

The premise is infamous.  Watch a cursed video tape and die seven days later...unless.  Unless what?  Unless you can figure out a way to avoid the curse.  Despite Ringu's status as a ghost story, most of the film functions as a procedural, with Reiko studying the tape and seeking out its origins, one video clue at a time.  The tape itself is more ominous than frightening (the American redux offers a gruesome Quay Brothers variation), but the meting out of the answers is logical and satisfying, with each shot in the tape corresponding to an element in the tragic life and death of one Sadako Yamamura.  When the heroes arrive at Sadako's home, the opportunity arises for an easy infodump, but director Hideo Nakata and scripter Hiroshi Takahashi keep things vivid by packaging most of the backstory into a grainy flashback scene.

Nakata's staging of suspense works in the classical way, with silence building the dread and quiet wide-eyed characters looking off-screen at horrible things the audience clearly cannot handle.  One of his trickier techniques is how he will suddenly cut to a wide shot with a character standing right in the center.  Filmmakers usually like to "match on action," which means they smooth over the abruptness of a cut by joining two shots with a continuous motion.  But instead of the actor walking into the shot, or the camera panning to the actor, Nakata has them simply be there.  It's a striking way to keep the viewers off-balance.  The emphasis on ocean waves and noisome well water also adds to the film's visual identity.

If you're able to see past the basement-damp atmosphere of the picture, weird hints of misogyny emerge.  The heroine is frequently given to hysterics: she interrupts a calm dinner scene with sudden shrieks, and a late film moment involves the hero slapping some sense into her.  While Reiko lacks a sense of dimension beyond her Nancy Drew sleuthing, Ryuji offers a tragic side with the burden of his psychic abilities.  Given Nakata's more proactive and heroic mother in similar ghost-fest Dark Water (a film about equal to this one), these choices are likely incidental.  They may even be holdovers from the original Ringu novel, and they clearly exist inside the boundaries of possibility...but they distract nonetheless.

On an initial viewing, Ringu's influence on the horror genre appears to be wide-reaching.  The Pang Brothers' The Eye brazenly copies the story structure, complete with a retreat to rustic settings and the double-twist tragedy, and later films also try to tie ghosts to modern technology - look at Pulse, Shutter and Phone (guess what that one's about).  Ringu also influenced Hollywood, which is to say, Hollywood bought the rights and remade the film.  However, there is one advantage the remake has over this film: the crazy idea to have a horse lose its mind and run around on a boat before diving into the ocean.  Sadly, The Ring made the mistake of sucking the horse into the propeller and chopping it up, when the rest of the movie should've been about the horse.  He was the only person smart enough to stay the hell away from death-curses.

RATING: B+

Sidebar: if you're confused by the omnipresence of pallid black-haired female vengeance ghosts in Asian cinema, Google the word "onryo."  These ghosts are more common to Japanese folklore than vampires are to Western tradition.  Their overuse notwithstanding, there's a reason why they're so prevalent.