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Film Review: Ring – 1998

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Director(s)Hideo Nakata
Principal CastNanako Matsushima as Reiko Asakawa
Hiroyuki Sanada as Ryūji Takayama
Rikiya Ōtaka as Yōichi Asakawa
Release Date1998
Language(s)Japanese
Running Time95 minutes
Report CardClick to go Review TLDR/Summary

Note: This review contains spoilers regarding the first 30 minutes of the film as opposed to the site’s usual benchmark of 10-20 minutes. The same effort towards sustaining the intrigue and momentum of the film, especially in its second and third acts, is maintained in this review, and all plot details revealed are just meant to be a springboard to discuss the scope of the work in better detail. Nothing discussed should undermine the “best” portions of the film or the many mysteries that keep the story engaging.

Waves churn in the sea.
The waves slowly dissolve and become….
… a screen of pixels…
which end up “becoming” a baseball game.
From left to right: Masami(Hitomi Sato) and Tomoko (Yûko Takeuchi) have the baseball game playing in the background.
Masami(Hitomi Sato) tells Tomoko (Yûko Takeuchi) about the cursed videotape.
The clock ticks ominously.
The happy mood between Masami(Hitomi Sato) and Tomoko (Yûko Takeuchi) dissipates as the truth comes out.
Masami(Hitomi Sato) and Tomoko (Yûko Takeuchi) answer the phone downstairs and are relieved upon hearing Tomoko’s parents.
The television turns on behind Tomoko ( Yûko Takeuchi) as if by its own volition.
Tomoko ( Yûko Takeuchi) stares at the screen in fear.
Tomoko’s ( Yûko Takeuchi) face freezes as the negative image takes hold of the frame.
The domain of technology is shown to be home to forces beyond human comprehension as the sea’s waters become the pixels which comprise the television’s image, looming ominously in the background while Tomoko and Masami talk gleefully to one another. Far from being alone, the girl’s are seen by a force of nature, an emissary of the sea. When Masami mentions the tale of the cursed VHS tape, it’s as this presence is named. Somehow, there’s a connection. Tomoko mentions she’s watched the tape and the sound of a phone call confirms that something is wrong. Far from being a rumor, the threat of a specter becomes a genuine possibility. When Masami leaves Tomoko under the assumption that everything is fine, the threat manifests as real, taking Tomoko by surprise and snapping a photograph of her, a negative image in contrast to the film’s positive image.

Ambient rumbles and the sounds of the churning waves mix as the camera pans over a tumultuous sea. The uncanny waters become grainy before dissolving into the static dots of a television set; thus, nature and technology merge in unholy unison. A pathway is formed. Static transforms the sea into a baseball game.

It’s revealed that two young girls, Tomoko (Yuko Takeuchi) and Masami (Hitomi Sato), have the game on in the background, as a source of background noise to a conversation they’re having. The latter mentions an urban rumor regarding a cursed VHS tape which supposedly kills its viewer after exactly 7 days. Apparently, after watching the tape, the viewer receives a phone call confirming their doom and then they succumb a week later as consequence. Tomoko displays an unease and asks where Masami heard about the rumor before revealing that she’s seen the aforementioned tape. Suddenly, the clock on the wall becomes a menacing presence, a death knell counting down towards Tomoko’s inevitable end. Terror takes its hold and the jovial mood in the room dissipates as demise makes itself known. It’s at this point Tomoko breaks the tension by claiming she’s joking and the girls laugh once again.

However, this moment of relief is ripped out from under them. The ominous ringing of a phone pierces the soundscape and casts a spell of doom, silencing the girls’ laughter. Both girls go downstairs towards the phone which beckons them forward. Masami picks it up and expresses relief upon hearing Tomoko’s parents on the other side. She hands the phone to her friend and goes upstairs, assured that the crisis is averted.

Unfortunately, this reprieve is also revealed to be temporary; despite being clearly off before, the television set near the phone turns on. The baseball game from earlier which marked a peaceful change from the sea now casts an ominous electric blue light. The relationship between sea and television has now been reversed: the television itself imposes presence of the blue, tumultuous waves come alive in the form of a similar colored light.

Tomoko attempts to turn the television off, but the technological apparatus initially refuses her commands. Finally, she succeeds in her endeavor and turns around assured that the issue over. But as she gets a drink ready, she hears a presence making scratching noises behind her. She turns her head to confront the presence and her face breaks into absolute terror. The frame freezes and the colors invert; a negative image takes the place of a positive image as if the unseen presence has taken a picture of Tomoko’s reaction to its abject aura – a snapshot taken from and by the void.

Thus, the film allows for a film to be born from within its structure – the start of a series of negative images that serve as an undercurrent to the positive appearance which will dominate the majority of the film. Far from being just a diegetic element, the spectral nature of the rumored VHS tape permeates into the non-diegetic layer and suggests that Ring itself shares the same uncanny characteristics as the cursed video that serves as the heart of its narrative proper.

A young girl is intervied by Reiko, captured in a positive image by the camera.
Reiko(Nanako Matsushima) asks about the cursed video tape.
The group of schoolgirls talk about the urban rumor regarding the VHS tape.
In contrast to the negative image image of Tomoko, a positive image of a young girl fills the frame. This time the camera is controlled by a human force, Reiko, who is reporting on the urban tale of the cursed VHS tape. Though the news segment she’s filming appears to be some small news, the introduction alerts us that this otherwise innocuous sounding gossip is anything but.

This dichotomy between film and the reality it frames and captures is doubled down in the next scene which follows our protagonist Reiko (Nanako Matsushima), a news reporter, as she interviews young schoolgirls about the rumors swirling around the cursed tape. In contrast to Tomoko’s spectral encounter whereby reality gave way to negative photographic capture, Reiko’s news report transforms reality into positive photographic capture. In her case, she films to get footage for a news report which calls to question what the negative image and the cursed VHS tape are being/have been produced for. A matrix is made present through the juxtapositions of images caught between the planes of the living and the otherworld.

Yōichi(Rikiya Ōtaka) sits facing the television, waiting for Reiko to come back home.
Yōichi(Rikiya Ōtaka) helps zip up Reiko’s (Nanako Matsushima) dress in preparation for his cousin’s funeral. His questions about why his cousin died are answered in unsatisfying fashion.
Reiko leaves Yōichi with his grandfather.
Yōichi’s cousin is revealed to be Tomoko ( Yûko Takeuchi), the young woman who saw the tape at the start of the film.
Yōichi(Rikiya Ōtaka) sees what appears to be Tomoko running up the stairs.
The lighting switches from dark to light momentarily as a young girl, presumably Tomoko, runs up the stairs.
Yōichi(Rikiya Ōtaka) walks up the stairs which are dark once again.
Yōichi is led to Tomoko’s room, the place where the sea became the television.
Reiko (Nanako Matsushima) finds Yōichi(Rikiya Ōtaka) in the room and takes him out before anything can transpire.
Televisions litter the mise-en-scène, becoming gradually more unsettling as the film continues. When we see Yōichi sitting innocuously by one while waiting for his mother, Reiko, the unit seems benign. However, it ultimately becomes an malevolent force as Yōichi comes face to face with the television which first marked the encounter with the sea qua uncanny. Furthermore, he is led to this encounter by none other than the victim of the tape’s curse, his cousin, Tomoko. The re-appearance of the young woman suggests that the business with the tape is far from being over.

Reiko returns to her abode post interview and is greeted by her son, Yōichi (Rikiya Ōtaka), who helps her get ready for a funeral. While zipping up her dress, Yōichi asks Reiko why his cousin, Tomo-chan, died and if kids die in general – serious issues to deal with, especially when asked by a child. His mother answers both questions matter-of-factly, that is to say in an unsatisfying matter, and brushes off the gravity of his existential distress, telling him instead to keep such thoughts quieter around her sister, Tomo-chan’s mother, as to not distress her. Angst about death is pushed underground in favor of keeping an appearance of peace.

The mother-son pair arrive at Reiko’s sister’s place where Reiko’s father (Katsumi Muramatsu) takes Yōichi aside to give Reiko time to help with the funeral arrangements. It’s at this point Reiko’s journey and the film’s opening intertwine as it’s revealed that Tomo-chan is none other than Tomoko, the first on-screen victim of the cursed VHS tape. Yōichi stares at her picture on the wall longingly. It’s clear that her absence is troubling him.

While he stands at the foot of darkly lit stairs, he suddenly sees a young girl’s feet running up them, the darkness momentarily replaced by light. If Tomoko’s absence brings darkness to his life, then this change in lighting suggests he feels her presence. Is this a psychic vision, manifestation of his loss, or a mixture of both? No answer is given.

Yōichi follows this potential “Tomoko” up the stairs before coming face to face with the television in her bedroom, her apparition now missing. Paranoia builds as the horrors of the opening rear their head more viciously here – a TV, the presence of something supernatural, and someone left all alone. Thankfully, Reiko, who had been looking for Yōichi , finds him alone in the room and whisks him out promptly; the confrontation with the abyss is averted momentarily.

Outside of the house, hosts of schoolgirls stand looking both solemn and uncomfortable. Reiko notices them as she’s getting ready to leave and goes to question them. She naturally gets the girls to open up and explain their concerns without fear of judgement. Like the schoolgirls she interviewed earlier, these girls mention a cursed video tape and confirm that Tomoko and friends of her not only saw the tape while on a trip to Izu but died on the same day in similarly incomprehensible circumstances. Once again, the tape comes up as the source of everything. Now caught at the intersection between her investigative pursuits and family tragedy, Reiko’s dance with the abyss has come. The tape and her are on a collision course with one another.

Footage of two of the victims, who were both discovered dead in a car with no sign of foul play.
Reiko (Nanako Matsushima) and her co-worker analyze the footage.
The victim’s face is frozen in abject terror.
As Reiko analyzes footage of other apparent curse victims, the viewer is drawn into the process of analyzing the minute details of the film. The faces of the victims look frozen as if caught at their most scared.

Drawn by the enigma presented by the situation, Reiko goes to work and begins investigating the deaths of Tomoko’s friends, analyzing the footage documenting the discovery of two of their deaths. One of their faces, that of a young girl, is frozen in abject terror as if scared beyond comprehensible limits. The moment is demarcated and framed, captured in a moment to be investigated, replayed, and reinterpreted. Photography captures the present and transforms into a discretized unit of time, capable of being reactivated with new perspectives.

An gust with no apparent source helps Reiko notice a note.
Reiko’s (Nanako Matsushima) sister (Kiriko Shimizu) comes into the room unnoticed and struggles to describe how Tomoko died.
Tomoko’s (Yûko Takeuichi) body lays crumpled in her closet.
Tomoko’s ( Yûko Takeuichi) face is contorted into absolute terror like her classmates who died.
Tomoko’s face matches the face of the other victims of the tape calling to question what exactly could be so terrifying that people would die with an expression of utter terror on their face. Reiko is headed on the course to find out as the force responsible for these deaths seems to edge her towards finding it, pointing out Tomoko’s note in an effort to lure the reporter.

While the mechanics of how the students died remains a mystery to Reiko, the confirmation that the entire group died around the same time as Tomoko drives her towards investigating her family connection more stringently. She goes to her sister’s house and investigates Tomoko’s room. Initially unable to notice anything, she discovers a folded piece of paper as it’s brought to her attention by an unseen presence, a small wind with seemingly no in-room source which moves the note. Written inside is a date along with the name of a photo processing store. It seems that Tomoko’s’ vacation pictures from Izu have yet to be picked up – a new clue for Reiko to follow.

Just as Reiko turns to leave the room, her sister shows up from behind, expressing a demonstrable trauma in the shattered look on her face. The latter looks at Tomoko’s closet and finds herself unable to describe the manner in which she found her daughter’s corpse. Instead, the film shows us this horrific discovery flashback. The closet door opens and Tomoko’s body is shown crumpled in a corner, her face frozen in the same terrifying manner as her similarly deceased friend. Both girls look scared to death, their faces trapped in absolute horror.

The photos of Tomoko and her friends appear normal.
Reiko (Nanako Matsushima) looks at the photographs and seems relieved.
By a certain date, the images become distorted. The students’ faces are now warped and indiscernible.
The plot thickens as the photographs of Tomoko and her friends look markedly different before and after a certain date. Their faces go from joyous and jovial to distorted and indiscernible, as though something is effacing the camera’s ability to directly capture their images. It’s like an unseen filter clouds the camera’s eyes – another spectral technological event.

Later at the photography store, Reiko discovers that the photographs of Tomoko and her friends have a marked difference before and after a date in time. While their early photos in Izu are marked with smiling faces and cheery dispositions, the latter photos are marked by distortion and disturbances. Once again, technology has been rendered uncanny from a previously domestic state; an unseen force returns and inhabits the technology which formerly worked as tool for the living and turns it into a tool for the spectral. Happy faces become distorted, but we know they’ll end up breaking into a blood-chilling terror that will remain forevermore etched onto the faces of the victims. But the cause of this metaphysical transformation is still to be discovered and Reiko is determined to get to the bottom of it.

Reiko (Nanako Matsushima) sends Yōichi to school, choosing, once again, to not answer his questions. Instead, she chooses to go to Izu to investigate the cursed tape. A visual marker with the time and date along with a strange aural cue come up on the screen as she makes this choice, marking the occasion.
Reiko (Nanako Matsushima) is unable to find anything in the cabin the students rented sans a notebook that guests can write in. As she flips the pages, she comes upon a drawing of a child and their parents with a statement indicating that a child’s traits are a result of their parents’ traits.
Reiko scans the tapes that customers can borrow.
An umarked VHS tape takes control of the frame, giving it a grainy filter similar to the pixels of a television screen. Like the gust of wind from earlier, a presence is calling Reiko.
Reiko (Nanako Matsushima) puts the television on.
Reiko (Nanako Matsushima) prepares herself for the tape to start.
Reiko’s confrontation with the tape is marked by increasing intrusions, first in the form of a textual and auditory marker signifying the date and then by the cursed tape itself which applies a grainy filter to the image. Far from just being an object in the plot, the tape seems to exude control over non-diegetic elements and choices in the story.

The next day comes and Reiko prepares to trek to Izu in order to find more pertinent information. While she cooks food for Yōichi to warm up and eat later at night during her absence, he comes up to her and informs her that Tomoko watched the curse tape. Obviously upset that her son has knowledge of such matters, she asks him where he learned about such a fact before then beseeching him to not mention the issue at school. Once again, Reiko skirts the uncomfortable topic broached by her son in favor of idyllic appearances that taper over the abyss.

It’s at this point that the date and day of the week- Monday, September 13th – comes onto the screen accompanied by a disconcerting, yet melancholic set of sounds. Like the spectral snapshot taken of Tomoko, this non-diegetic feature becomes open to diegetic possibilities. If a specter took a “photo” of Tomoko, who’s to say it’s not documenting Reiko until she meets a similar fate? Viewed in this way, the text marks the starting date of Reiko’s confrontation with constitutive void hiding at the heart of the tape. This audio-visual interruption dissipates and Reiko departs towards the inn Tomoko and the other students stayed in.

Inside the inn, her attempts at investigation come up nil. There appears to be no hints or clues towards foul play of any sorts. Opposed to any clues, Reiko only manages to find a notebook filled with quotes and drawings from previous guests. A sketch by a child catches her attention. It depicts a obese mother, father, and child figure. Written near the drawing is the child’s declaration that they are fat because their mother and father are fat. Thus, the qualities of the child inhere from the qualities of the parent; if something is found in the former, it is due to something from the latter. Seemingly benign, this observation will come to play a pivotal role in deciphering the assemblage of terrors lying in wait.

At a surface level, films are the children of creator-parents that give birth to them and disseminate them into the world. Choices like framing, editing, sound design, camera movements, and the like are decisions that play a decisive role in determining the genetic make-up of a film and what it “grows” up to be. Given this, Reiko’s upcoming confrontation with the VHS tape will bring to question the nature of its “parent” and the tape qua child’s place in the world.

While questioning the front desk about Tomoko and her friends, Reiko notices an unmarked VHS tape in the rental stack of tapes available for those staying in the inns. The tape calls out to Reiko, directly transforming the film. Its presence forces a close-up and the camera’s filter becomes grainy and textured as if unable to fully contain the presence manifesting in the moment. The pull is enough and Reiko rents it. She takes it back to her cabin. The time has come. Reiko puts the tape in and lets it play.

A view of the clouds from a well.
A woman(Masako) brushes her hair in the mirror.
A girl(Rie Inō) with hair covering her face
The woman(Masako) looks over at the girl.
The word “Eruption” erupts through the frame, manifesting in a variety of shapes and sizes.
Men crawl and rumble in disorienting fashion.
A man with a towel over his head points towards our left.
“Sada” appears in an eye which stares at the screen.
A well appears.
The contents of the cursed video tape prove to offer very little immediate meaning. The montage seems to lack any throughline, but the grainy, ambiguous presentation of each scenario creates a palpable unease.

The tape and the film become one as the viewer and Reiko view the cursed footage from the same proximity, that of minimal distance. A view from a well cuts to a mirror’s reflection of a woman brushing hair. Another mirrored reflection, this time from framed on the right of the screen instead of the left, comes in momentarily, depicting a young woman with hair covering her face. The initial woman’s reflection stares at the other woman before text ruptures the screen. The word “eruption” appears all over. Blurred people crawl along a hillock while the ambient whispers present in the soundscape erupt into what sounds like guttural chanting emanating from an abyss. A man with a towel on his head points towards the left of the frame as sharp noises jolts the auditory precession before an eerie silence takes hold. A blinking eye gazes at the viewer. Letters seemingly appear in the pupil. Finally, a well appears on the screen and the camera lingers as if waiting for a presence. But nothing comes.

Reiko(Nanako Matsushima) notices a specter’s(Rie Inō) reflection on the television.
Reiko(Nanako Matsushima) picks up the phone and hears nothing.
The clock ticks, announcing her future time of death.
The television sits even as Reiko leaves, marking the site of her confrontation with the world beyond. Its presence as a conduit between the worlds is confirmed one and for all.
Reiko’s confrontation with the tape, marked by both a visit by a specter along with the dreaded call at the end of it all, confirms that the curse of the tape is real. Far from a tool of humanity, the television set has rendered a site for the immemorial to take hold again, as forces from beyond make their presence felt on the world of the living. The television set sits as though representative of an sinister agency that far exceeds its boxy frame.

Suddenly, the film cuts back from the tape to Reiko watching it, granting the viewer a distance, a mercy it does not extend to Reiko who spots in her reflection against the television screen a specter staring back her. A haunted tape featuring reflections played on a television which becomes a mirror depicting the tapes viewer and creator. The TV set becomes the site where the immemorial clashes with the contemporary – technology serves as a conduit for both the human and non-human and allows the planes to interact with one another.

Right on cue, the phone rings and the doom sets in. Reiko gets no answer on the call, but she as well as the viewer know that her date has been set. Seven days exactly till she meets the same end as her deceased niece. Now the battle has come to head and the textual interlude marking the date – Monday the 13th – and the clock marking the time – a little past 7:05 P.M.- becomes a time of death cast exactly 7 days in the future. Understandably frightened by the encounter, Reiko runs out of the room, but the camera lingers and stays focused on the television, reminding the viewer of who’s currently winning the battle. With the clock ticking against her in the most literal of senses, Reiko is forced to trek back home and call upon the help of her estranged ex-husband, Ryūji (Hiroyuki Sanada), to get to the bottom of the mystery before her untimely demise.

Given its set-up, it’s no wonder that director Hideo Nakata’s Ring legacy has endured since its inception; the film injects the terror of horror as genre into the structure of the film itself, creating a loop wherein the diegetic and non-diegetic elements intertwine with one another, informing each other. At one level the viewer is watching a film about characters watching a film (of sorts) which the viewer also gets to watch. The viewer is then made to analyze the structural choices of this film within the film, as Reiko and Ryūji do minute analyses behind the creator’s choices to figure out how to unravel. Simultaneously, the structure of Ring proper- it’s editing choices, freeze frames, textual interludes describing the day, and the like – gives the film a feeling of returning on itself. It’s as if a film is being made from within the film about a film – a circuit whereby the spectral and the technological intertwine with one another in a constantly shifting dance of meaning. The same questions and methods of analyses used on the cursed footage leaks over to the film proper, begging the question of where the VHS tape ends and where the film begins.

Ring constantly seeks to probe this sense of discomfort via its demonstration of how same channels humans use to communicate with one another can give to an unhuman force. Phones which help connect family members across geographical boundaries now connect the spectral and corporeal, rendering the boundaries between the human and nonhuman bare. Televisions which provide entertainment and a respite from the drudgery of the day became channels by which the other world can reach out and curse the living. Technology becomes a marker of the trace between humanity and its attempt at demarcating itself against. No one is safe…not even the viewer who is subject to the same “cursed” footage that victims and Reiko have seen. It becomes clear that if such a phenomenon were to occur in our world, we’d be just as doomed, just as trapped as Reiko. We watched the tape too. Thus, spectral intrusion is demonstrated to be as insidious as it is terrifying. It can’t be taken seriously until it’s too late.

Not since Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a film about a serial killer who kills women and photographs their contorted dying expressions, has a film so brilliantly captured the perversity inherent in photography and the way it captures the subject within its frame. Despite utilizing a different sub-genre as vantage point, supernatural and cosmic over slasher, Ring manages to traverse into the same uncanny territories Peeping Tom does in revealing the terrors inherent within humanity. The films’ shared focus on capturing dying expressions is a result of their investigative focuses: the liminal point at which humanity renders unto itself unhumanity.

This is why Ring is and will always continue to remain eerie, if not outright terrifying, long after the age of VHS tapes. It preys on the terrors lying at the heart of the horror genre – the peripheries and vestiges of that uncanny which we feel in our mythos and the world around us but can’t even pinpoint. It takes the act of viewing horror media itself as the basis of its investigation, forcing the viewer into an intimate encounter with the subject matter. Nakata’s film is demonstration that fear is a result not of loid noises or shocking violence but of making the viewer investigate the difference between reality and the abyss that seems to follow it.

REPORT CARD

TLDRWhile Ring‘s legacy is more so remembered today for its impact in making J-Horror a global phenomenon both in terms of exports and westernized remakes, it goes without saying that the film itself a bona fide horror classic of the highest caliber. Hideo Nakata’s disturbing investigation into the ways technology renders the world from beyond to investigate with the world we inhabit is not only eerie in the way it renders some of our most used tools (televisions, phones) conduits for the supernatural but also reaffirms the power of the horror film and its ability to force encounters with the uncanny. By focusing the film on the power of horror film itself and taking those ideas to the extreme, Nakata is able to deeply unsettle and render even the medium the movie is playing on disturbing. It’s no wonder then that so many people find it hard to watch their television after watching this film. It’s hard to take the screen as trustworthy ever again.
Rating10/10
GradeS+

Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis.
Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .

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