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Film%20Critique
Naomi Watts Goes into the Well
Ringu

by By Cole Smithey

December 30, 2004

The sequel to the American remake of the

1998 Japanese horror flick

Ringu

suffers

from common horror genre pitfalls of creepy elements that fail in

building authentic suspense or fear.

Ringu

 director

Hideo Nakata presides over an image system based on the element of

water as newspaper reporter Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) attempts

to settle into a new life with her haunted son Aidan (David

Dorfman) in the coastal town of Astoria, Oregon.



The videotape that kills those who watch it

plays a lesser role here than it did in

The

Ring

 with the primary tension

focusing on the uneasy relationship between a confused mother and

her semi-possessed child. Unexplained plot devices derail the

Japanese inflected horror story that’s characteristically fueled

by a mysterious longhaired ghoul girl character.



The movie opens with a throwback scene to the

first

Ring

 movie

with a teenage boy and girl sitting on a couch. The boy insists

that the girl watch an underground videotape that he describes as

the scariest film he’s ever seen. Although she’s more interested

in making out, he insists that she watch it and exits for the

kitchen where he fields a dreaded phone call as he stresses about

the girl watching the tape before his one-week deadline runs out.

We don’t get to witness the cause of the sudden death that

follows—only the result. When Rachel arrives at the crime scene in

her newspaper reporter mode we see the twisted face of terror on

the fresh corpse. But it arrives as a horror device without

sufficient context.



Rachel and her son Aidan have been trying to

escape from the grimy clutches of Samara, a little ghost girl

whose mother killed, or attempted to kill as a result of

postpartum depression. Things get especially inconsistent in the

plot because Samara inhabits Aidan for much of the story and

exerts enough psychic kinetic power to cause at least one person

to commit suicide. It begs a question as to why Samara doesn’t

just control Rachel’s mind to do her bidding since she is looking

for a surrogate mother figure in Rachel.



Nakata also directed a Japanese sequel

to

Ringu

,

but it bears little resemblance to this American follow-up. Nakata

puts visual emphasis on the watery aspects of the story with long

ponderous shots of bodies of water and by infusing every scene

with shades of gray and blue that support his vision but never add

up to anything more than a slightly off-kilter atmosphere.



A lot is currently being made of the

“extreme” horror cinema of Japan, but the films pale by comparison

with those of Alfred Hitchcock or Roman Polanski. Horror

filmmakers like Nakata would do well to study movies like

Polanski’s

The

Tenant

 where information is

steadily layered over a story that equally increases in

tempo.



The Ring

Two

 is a horror movie with very

few surprises and hit-or-miss moments of suspense that don’t lead

anywhere on a narrative or emotional level. A climax of the movie

occurs when a herd of deer attacks Rachel and Aidan as they’re

driving. It’s a virtuoso scene that really gets your heart racing

for its sudden revelation that animals are reacting to the evil

that rides in Rachel’s car. But the scene feels pasted on to the

script because it never resonates anywhere else in the

movie.



Without Watts returning to make the sequel

there would be no movie, and the actress does a bang up job with

bringing a powerful sense of dread and desperation to her role.

For the actress whose career was jumpstarted when she made David

Lynch’s

Mulholland

Drive

, audiences can only hope that

she gets another golden opportunity to make such a riveting film

as that one. Unfortunately,

The Ring

Two

is not that movie.

MTW