SPOILER DISCUSSION

1.The presence of Sadako qua Tomoko is immediately made apparent to Ryūji as he enters Reiko’s apartment. Nakata reveals that the duo is being gazed down by another entity by moving the camera up as Ryūji visibly reacts to something. The moment is unnerving because it reveals that the uncanny is always present but it also sets up that the Ryūji is part of that order; he’s been invited by Reiko precisely because of his difference.

This also helps make sense of Yōichi’s earlier use of psychic powers. His genetics reflect both his parents, a callback to the resort entry as well about parents shaping up their child.

Finally, this sets up the lack of a phone-call from Sadako after watching the tape. Initially, the lack of contact runs counter to both the urban legend surrounding the tape and Reiko’s own experience. It’s a red herring meant to cast doubt nature on what the curse is. But in reality, Sadako is still going to communicate with him; she’s just choosing to do it in a manner most conducive to another psychic.

When Ryūji sits on a bench in a public area, he notices a presence and sees what appears to be Tomoko’s feet, but he quickly ascertains the presence as Sadako. This is his version of the phone-call after the tape and the encounter demonstrates the powers Sadako has at her disposal. Like a kind of spiritual vampire, she can absorb and take on the forms of her former victims, and her presence is so strong that she can manifest and appear to be incorporated within the real world.

This moment also recontextualizes Yōichi ‘s initial discovery of Tomoko’s room via her specter; it may have been her presence, but it was only her husk being manipulated by Sadako to get him to respond to her. In the vein of the vampire tale, she “invited” herself into his domain by acting under the guise of the cousin he loved so much.

2.The film constantly emphasizes the notion of motherhood while calling into question the role of fatherhood. Both Sadako and Reiko’s family units operate without a primary father figure. Sadako emphasizes this in the construction of her cursed tape which shows both her and her mother reflected but only shows a “father” figure under the cover of a towel.

Likewise, Ryūji notices that he’s absent in any of the photographs at Reiko’s house. His presence is ignored until he’s needed and called upon to resolve the seemingly irresolvable.

The film seems to stress that it’s this role of necessary injunction that fatherhood must play. Within the structure of the tape, the father figure, a man with a towel on his head standing before the sea, points at a direction. This shot is in between shots of the volcano erupting and Sadako’s eye showcasing said eruption. Shizuko predicted the volcano’s eruption, the event which precipitated Sadako’s current state. Thus, the father in this sequence serves as a kind of causal link, pointing from one state to another.

This shot is repeated at the 48 minute mark when Yōichi goes to watch the tape after Reiko falls asleep, but it involves a different father figure; this one is clad in a fully dark garb as opposed to wearing multiple colors. If his mother won’t answer his questions about death and Tomoko satisfactorily, he might as well ask Sadako, the progenitor of it all. As he goes to watch the tape, Reiko’s slumber is interrupted by a vision of the man which “dissolves” over her and then comes into prominence a second time, as if the world of the film is literally reaching out and attempting to intervene within her own world. But she’s too late to stop her son and his fate becomes tied to the tape’s callings.

When the father figure appears for the third time, it’s revealed that both he and the second figure are/were Ryūji; they share the same outfit. While the second figure appears from the vantage point of the cursed tape, the third figure appears from the vantage point of the corporeal world within the film, albeit in a reflection on the television screen – a counterpoint to being from within the screen itself. This time the figure points at the copy of the tape after Reiko asks how the curse operates, establishing a proper cause and effect. This retroactive identification of the second father also demonstrates the temporal distinction between the realm of the uncanny and the living: the former represents an internal order. Ryūji, in a sense, is always ordered towards death, especially as a psychic.

At a larger level, the three fathers demonstrate the way the order of the spectral and the order of the corporeal relate to one another; they exist as mirror planes, like two sides of a coin. Each time, the father figure imposes an casual order on two different states, structuring the uncanny in cognizable terms. He starts as a figure from behind the screen, cast with the sea behind him. Then he becomes a figure from the screen, operating in parallel to the corporeal. Finally, he becomes a figure reflecting against the screen, existing within the corporeal without being “present”. This ordering matches the progression of Sadako’s wrath: she is born, she makes a tape as a message, and then she uses that tape to make her presence felt in spite of physical form.

Furthermore, the ordering of the fathers reveals the logic of Sadako’s mission and function. The first time, the eruption becomes Sadako. The incident causes her mother to become famous, suffer, and bring Sadako into the world. It causes Sadako’s fury to erupt towards the world. The presence of the mysterious father figure against the sea is a choice that becomes unnerving upon taking Ryūji’s commentary about Sadako’s lineage more seriously: instead of having a human father, her father is the uncanny presence of the sea itself. Sadako’s uncle (Yōichi Numata) mentions that the sea is a presence marked with death and is considered unlucky – it is the ultimate site of the uncanny and reveals the fluid membrane “separating” the living and the non-living. Sadako’s presence is a union between these elements – she is the emissary of an unholy union.

The second time, the message becomes Sadako’s message. The incident causes Yōichi to become “baptized” by Sadako’s message and he becomes part of her congregation along with his mother, father, and Tomoko. But Reiko resists and tries to cover her son’s eyes and ears, an attempt to protect him from Sadako’s domain.

The third time, the answer becomes the propagation of Sadako’s will. Reiko’s desperate cries to figure out a way to save her child call back her husband from before; this time she understands his warning and acts on it in time. As opposed to earlier, she does not run from Sadako’s message but instead acts as an emissary ready to spread the good word.

3. But the uncanny is not singularly associated with the figure of the father. Outside of both Sadako and Shizuko, the earlier drawing of the family attributing the traits of a child to their parents suggests that Yōichi, a psychic, is only a psychic because both his mother and father have psychic characteristics. This would suggest that Reiko herself has psychic characteristics – her rejection of Ryūji due to those characteristics is an externalization of her attempt to reject her own uncanny disposition.

If the figure of the father represents an ordering function that casually makes sense of the uncanny, then the figure of the mother is tied to one of creation and preservation. It’s the mothers, both Shizuko and Reiko, that take care of their children without assistance from other parties. Sadako makes the original tape and Reiko is the one who propagates the cycle of copies, creating the first and second copy. The tape is very much Sadako’s child, a product of her attributes given new life via a corporeal medium.

4. In this way, the tape is a conduit that allows that ties the temporal loop between the uncanny and the corporeal, allowing the two realms to operate against and within one another. At the 59-minute mark, this logic is made even more explicit. Ryūji uses his powers to infiltrate and absorb Sadako’s uncle’s memories of the terrifying situation recalling Shizuko and Sadako. Shizuko successfully uses her psychic abilities but is called a fraud by the crowd. Sadako reacts to this by using her powers to kill the first instigator against her mother. The man promptly dies. Sadako walks over to Reiko, who watches the vision through psychic proximity, and then menacingly grabs her; the injury from the grab bubbles up from the encounter with the past and becomes imprinted upon the flesh of one in the present, marking a territorial hold.

This scene demonstrates extends the vampire metaphor further. Ryūji, for all intents and purposes, is biting into and taking in Sadako’s uncle’s memories; he’s opening them up to a less personal circuit where information can flow between multiple persons. Reiko is able to enter this circuit via proximity. This psychic vampirism allows the parties to inhabit the spectral trappings of the past, casting aside their corporeal forms for spiritual ones instead.

Sadako replicates Ryūji’s intrusion by pushing back- this time the past returns to the present. Reiko becomes the point of contact as opposed to Sadako’s uncle. The physical marking around Reiko’s hand is like a bite mark wound.

It’s at the moment of death that the portal between the corporeal and spectral open unto one another; the television set plays the last scene of the tape, the well, and then allows Sadako to crawl from behind the screen as a specter to outside of the screen as a corporeal entity.

When she finally takes Ryūji’s life, she reveals her eye and captures him in her gaze. It’s the confrontation with the gaze, with the uncanny staring directly back at him, that causes Ryūji to scream in terror and succumb to Sadako’s death curse. It’s at the moment his corporeal form fades that the negative image is taken, demarcating the moment where agency shifts towards an uncanny center.

This is why Sadako’s victims cannot take pictures of themselves after the curse has been placed. The curse ruptures the space between the corporeal and spectral within oneself and only the uncanny self can be framed anymore. Only Sadako’s negative image can capture this agency, a specter.