Such was the cult-like swelling of appreciation around this picture, that I was surprised to discover that in terms of effect and ambition it was at best a variant of 'The X-Files'. A particularly good, intelligent, eerie X-File, maybe, with an excellent sense of narrative, but an X-File nonetheless. In the West at any rate, it does not have the same impact as the movie it's been most compared to, 'The Blair Witch Project' - 'Ring''s exquisite formalism (in direction, plotting and acting) is in contrast with the compelling contrived naturalism of the American film, its roots in America's past, folk legends etc. The disparity between the Michael Haneke-like clarity of the image, and the various traces that can be made out - a reflection on a window, the glow of a lamp - is where the real chill is.
It is a cliche that the horror movie puts on the surface those things a society would rather not acknowledge - 'Ring' takes this literally, the source of its horrors being a young woman buried alive in a well. The repressed traumas that Japan is hiding, then, on the basis of this film, is the old, conservative past. It is surely significant that the victims are all 'morally suspect' - the teenage friends who go out of town for presumed sexual licence; the daughter of a mother who isn't in the home. The heroine is an independent single mother who leaves her son at home for alarmingly long patches. The new Western liberalism taints everyone.
The new capitalist Japan is not even as we might imagine it from received opinion - there are few teeming streets, noisy traffic jams, bright neon signs, consumer overload, towering skyscrapers. This is very much a quiet, minimalist Japan, of large empty rooms filled with dread, of quiet empty streets. All everyday sound is magnified to seem hyperreal, threatening. All absences betray the expectation of a malevolent presence.
Old Japan is very much alive in the elaborate, formal religious rituals, but in this film they are funeral rites, linking the traditional to death, and it is this suppressed tradition that returns from the dead. After all Sadako is killed by an adulterer. It is also the revenge of forgotten provinces on Tokyo, the regional infecting the metropolitan, nature fighting back artifice, history versus post-modernism. Women, though, are always witches. Plus ca change.
Of course, the curse is disseminated by modernity's most sophisticated and pervasive mode of communication, TV, itself a museum of the dead, especially late at night, when Sadako strikes, along with all the old movies and forgotten stars.
If 'Ring' itself seems rather smallscreen, the little curse-movie is a masterpiece - part-Bunuel, part-Dreyer, with its hair-brushing woman, characters teeming like an insect hive, crawling men, hooded votaries, incredibly symbolically-loaded well, it is easily the best film I've seen all year. This makes the potentially risible denouement, as Sadako emerges from the TV, so poignant, as she jerks like old scratchy film.
It is a cliche that the horror movie puts on the surface those things a society would rather not acknowledge - 'Ring' takes this literally, the source of its horrors being a young woman buried alive in a well. The repressed traumas that Japan is hiding, then, on the basis of this film, is the old, conservative past. It is surely significant that the victims are all 'morally suspect' - the teenage friends who go out of town for presumed sexual licence; the daughter of a mother who isn't in the home. The heroine is an independent single mother who leaves her son at home for alarmingly long patches. The new Western liberalism taints everyone.
The new capitalist Japan is not even as we might imagine it from received opinion - there are few teeming streets, noisy traffic jams, bright neon signs, consumer overload, towering skyscrapers. This is very much a quiet, minimalist Japan, of large empty rooms filled with dread, of quiet empty streets. All everyday sound is magnified to seem hyperreal, threatening. All absences betray the expectation of a malevolent presence.
Old Japan is very much alive in the elaborate, formal religious rituals, but in this film they are funeral rites, linking the traditional to death, and it is this suppressed tradition that returns from the dead. After all Sadako is killed by an adulterer. It is also the revenge of forgotten provinces on Tokyo, the regional infecting the metropolitan, nature fighting back artifice, history versus post-modernism. Women, though, are always witches. Plus ca change.
Of course, the curse is disseminated by modernity's most sophisticated and pervasive mode of communication, TV, itself a museum of the dead, especially late at night, when Sadako strikes, along with all the old movies and forgotten stars.
If 'Ring' itself seems rather smallscreen, the little curse-movie is a masterpiece - part-Bunuel, part-Dreyer, with its hair-brushing woman, characters teeming like an insect hive, crawling men, hooded votaries, incredibly symbolically-loaded well, it is easily the best film I've seen all year. This makes the potentially risible denouement, as Sadako emerges from the TV, so poignant, as she jerks like old scratchy film.