The Ring
The Plot
Watch the cursed videotape, and you die in seven days. As a journalist, Rachel doesn’t believe in the supernatural; even when her niece dies under inexplicable circumstances which render the sole witness to her death institutionalized. It’s only when Rachel finds and watches the tape herself that she starts to believe it might be more than just a myth, as she receives a mysterious phone call with nothing but the words seven days, and begins to experience a series of horrific hallucinations that grow more vivid and horrific the closer she comes to the deadline; and soon spill out into reality.
The Breakdown
Set in the rainy Pacific Northwest, this movie is positively suffused with gloom and dread, spilling out from the haunted video itself to touch every aspect of the characters’ lives. But it’s the movie’s strangeness which really gets under your skin as it plays with just enough of the surreal to keep you unbalanced. Just like the cursed tape itself, much of the movie’s horror is bizarre, disconnected, and all the more disturbing; from flashes of severed fingers twitching on a floor, to the image of a gaunt woman slowly brushing her hair in a mirror. A surprisingly competent mystery attempts to explore the origins of the haunted tape even further. The characters are smart and competent, and yet the deeper the investigate, the less they seem to understand.
The Scare Factor
The Ring is downright creepy, from the cursed video itself to the disturbing and inexplicable events that surround it. The entire movie is heavy with a sense of inevitability that will follow you for days—more precisely, for seven of them.