The Ring

At first, Rachel Keller takes the story for what it presumably is: one of those legends that teenagers pass along because it sounds just creepy enough at the right moment. There’s a videotape. Anyone who watches it receives a phone call afterward. Seven days later, they’re supposed to be dead.

Then her niece dies. Rachel (Naomi Watts), a journalist, begins to investigate. Several teenagers died under strange circumstances on the same evening after spending a weekend together in a remote cabin. There, Rachel finds the videotape.

She watches it. The images don’t tell a story. A ladder. A mirror. A chair. A well. Figures and objects appear without any explanation as to why they belong together. The tape seems less like a message than something that wasn’t meant to be understood by anyone at all.

Then the phone rings.

From that moment on, Rachel has seven days. The Ring doesn’t turn this deadline into a frantic race against a constantly visible threat. The countdown is on, but the film doesn’t constantly remind us of it. Rachel investigates. She examines individual images, follows leads, and tries to figure out where the tape came from. The more she finds out, the clearer the connections become—and the less harmless the idea seems that this is merely a macabre story.

Gore Verbinski’s film is remarkably patient in this regard. For a long time, the threat doesn’t take on a clear form that Rachel could defend herself against. Instead, it’s images that follow her. The video ends, but its motifs reappear outside the TV screen. Something that just moments ago looked like a meaningless black-and-white nightmare suddenly has a place in the real world.

This makes Rachel’s profession particularly well-suited to the story. She is accustomed to seeking out information, verifying sources, and piecing together a narrative from individual clues. Running away from a mystery is less her style than trying to solve it. But here, research is not a safe endeavor. Every new discovery draws her further into a story whose rules she does not yet know.

When her son Aidan (David Dorfman) also comes into contact with the tape, the stakes change. Rachel is no longer just looking for an explanation for the deaths. The seven days now have a second meaning, and suddenly it’s no longer enough to simply find out what happened.

Naomi Watts plays Rachel in a way that’s far from that of a classic horror character. Her fear often manifests first as heightened alertness. She looks more closely, asks one more question, drives to a place others would prefer to avoid. And almost everything she encounters can initially be treated as a clue: a picture, a recording, an address, an old story.

The television remains a surprisingly ordinary object throughout. It stands in the living room, in the hotel room, in rooms where people sleep and eat. It is precisely this familiarity that makes it unsettling. The Ring doesn’t need to create a special place where evil lurks. All it takes is a device that’s found almost everywhere anyway. Even the videotape itself seems old and mundane. You can take it out, rewind it, copy it, examine it frame by frame. Its physical tangibility doesn’t make things any more reassuring. Rachel can hold the object in her hands and is still hardly any closer to an explanation.

The world around her remains cool and wet. Streets, houses, and landscapes often look as if the rain has just stopped or is about to start again. Even during the day, the unease hardly fades. The film doesn’t need darkness as a prerequisite for fear; many of its images seem off simply because something familiar has been slightly thrown out of order.

The same goes for Aidan. His calmness is unsettling because Rachel increasingly realizes that he takes certain things more seriously than she does. When a child seems less surprised by events than his mother, that doesn’t necessarily help.

The Ring relies more on anticipation than on the next shock. A closed door can remain closed for a long time. A TV can simply sit there. A picture can be stared at for a few seconds too long. When danger has been foreshadowed, the mere act of waiting is enough at some point. You don’t need to know when it will appear if you already know it’s coming.

And at some point, even a TV that’s turned off no longer looks completely harmless.