2020 Blind Spot Series: The Ring (2002)

Despite it being widely praised by fans of the genre, I was never compelled to watch Gore Verbinski's The Ring as I always thought it'd be just another mediocre to say the least American horror. But it's a must-see, apparently, hence I picked it as my Blind Spot film for the month of October. And I wasted two hours of my day off to see it, hours I could have spent watching two episodes of Netflix's Dark, which is scarier, far more tense, suspenseful and twisted than this dreadfully boring flick. 

The film opens with two teenagers — Katie (Amber Tamblyn) and Becca (Rachael Bella) — as they talk about what they did the previous weekend. When Becca brings up the subject of a cursed videotape, a tape that kills whoever watches it seven days later, and Katie reveals in horror that she watched it the previous weekend with her boyfriend and some friends, and soon, after a series of unexplainable occurrences in her house, she mysteriously dies. 

Confirming the curse is her cousin Aidan (David Dorfman) who had been drawing pictures of Katie dead in the ground for days before she actually died. Aidan's mother, Rachel (Naomi Watts), is soon made aware of it by Aidan's teacher, but it's only when her sister, Katie's mother, asks her that Rachel starts investigating the mysterious videotape. Rachel doesn't believe it to be cursed and is determined to find out who or what killed her niece, but when both her son and she watches the tape, she must race against time to find out what's going on and stop it before it's too late for them.

One of the many issues with Verbinski's version — I haven't seen the original Japanese film so I don't know if that one has this same issue — is that rather than making us figure out the story and plot by ourselves and hence make the whole more compelling, it explains every single bit of the story through unnecessary dialogue. In addition, there are many plot holes and unanswered questions, and the ending, whose only purpose seems to be to make a sequel possible, makes the film feel incomplete. 

The characters have no characterization whatsoever which makes it very difficult to care about Rachel, Aiden, and his father Noah (Martin Henderson); as for Samara, the character doesn't make any sense, she doesn't even have a motivation to do what she does. I mean, even Jason Voorhees has some kind of a motive to kill people. 

In addition, Verbinski is successful at delivering a film that completely lacks tension and whose scary factor is almost null — the only scary moment in the entire film is when Katie's mom is talking about her daughter's death and then, out of nowhere, they show Katie's dead body. As for the special effects, they fail at making the film gory. 

Ultimately, The Ring is a poorly written and executed horror whose only saving grace is Naomi Watts's performance which is a bit wooden but it's the only thing that kept me watching.