| Ring | |
|---|---|
Japanese film poster |
|
| Directed by | Hideo Nakata |
| Produced by | Taka Ichise |
| Written by | Hiroshi Takahashi Kôji Suzuki |
| Starring | Nanako Matsushima Hiroyuki Sanada Rikiya Ōtaka Yoichi Numata |
| Music by | Kenji Kawai |
| Cinematography | Jun'ichirō Hayashi |
| Editing by | Nobuyuki Takahashi |
| Distributed by | Toho Company Ltd. |
| Release date(s) | January 31, 1998 |
| Running time | 96 minutes |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese |
| Budget | $1.2 million |
Ring (リング Ringu) is a 1998 Japanese horror film by Hideo Nakata, adapted from the novel Ring by Kōji Suzuki, which in turn draws on the Japanese folk tale Banchō Sarayashiki. The film stars Nanako Matsushima, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Rikiya Ōtaka as members of a divorced family. The film was later remade in the US as The Ring (2002).
Ring is about a cursed, disturbing videotape that, when watched, will cause the viewer to die a week after. The film is the highest grossing horror film in Japan at 12 billion yen ($137.7 million) and is also considered the most frightening horror film in Japan according to a survey of Oricon.[1]
Contents |
Two teenagers, Masami (Hitomi Satō) and Tomoko (Yūko Takeuchi) talk about a videotape recorded by a boy in Izu which is fabled to bear a curse that kills the viewer seven days after watching. Tomoko then reveals that a week ago, she and three of her friends watched a weird tape and received a call after watching it. Unnervingly similar to the storied videotape, Masami realizes that Tomoko was fated to die. After some unsettling moments, Tomoko is killed by an unseen force with Masami having the horror of watching.
Some days later, Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima), a reporter investigating the popularity of the video curse among teenagers, discovers that her niece, Tomoko and her three other friends mysteriously died at the same time on the same night with their faces twisted in a rictus of fear. She also discovers that Masami, the girl who was with Tomoko when she died, became insane and is now in a mental hospital. After stumbling upon Tomoko's photos from the past week, Reiko finds out that the four teenagers stayed in a rental cabin in Izu. Eventually, she flips to a photo of the teens with their faces blurred and distorted.
Later, Reiko goes to Izu and finds an unlabeled tape in the reception room of the rental cottage where the teenagers stayed. Watching the tape inside Cabin B4, Reiko sees a series of seemingly unrelated disturbing images. As soon as the tape is over, Reiko sees a reflection in the television, and as she turns to see nobody behind her she receives a phone call, a realization of the tell-tale videotape curse. She now assumes that she has a week to live.
On the first day, Reiko enlists the help of her ex-husband, Ryūji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada). They take a picture of Reiko and find her face blurred in the photograph, further confirming that Reiko really was cursed. Ryūji then watches the tape, against Asakawa's objections. A day later, Reiko creates a copy for Ryūji for them to study. They find a hidden message embedded within the tape saying that "if you keep on doing 'shōmon', the 'bōkon' will come for you." The message is in a form of dialect from Izu Ōshima Island. The two sail for Ōshima (after Asakawa's son Yoichi watches the videotape) and discover the history of the great psychic Shizuko Yamamura,whose astounding supernatural power was accused to be a fraud. Yamamura commited suicide for which and the power passed on to her daughter also made her distrusted by the world and ultimately, killed by her father.
With only a day left, Reiko and Ryūji discover that Shizuko's lost daughter, Sadako Yamamura, must have psionically made the videotape. Determined, the two go back to Izu with the assumption that Sadako is dead and it was her vengeful spirit that killed the teenagers. The duo then uncover a well under Cabin B4 and realize, through a vision, that Sadako's father killed her and threw her into the well. They try to empty the well and find Sadako's body in an attempt to appease her spirit. Reiko finds Sadako's body. When nothing happens to her, they believe that the curse is broken.
All seems fine until the next day when Ryūji is at his home and his TV switches on by itself showing the image of a well. He stares in horror as the ghost of Sadako crawls out of the well and out of Ryūji's TV set and frightens him into a state of shock, therefore killing him via cardiac arrest. Desperate to find a cure to save her son, Reiko realized that what she had done - and that Ryūji had not - saved her---copying the tape and showing it to Ryuji. With a VCR and Ryūji's copy of the tape, Reiko travels to see her son in attempt to save him, realizing that this is a never-ending cycle: The tape must always be copied and passed on to ensure the survival of the viewers.
After the initial success of the Ring novel, written by Kōji Suzuki, Kadokawa Shoten decided to make a motion picture adaptation of Ring. The whole production work took nine months and one week[2] The film's screenwriter, Hiroshi Takahashi, and director, Hideo Nakata, collaborated to work on the script after reading the novel and the TV adaptation of Ring.[3] With the budget of 1.2 million USD, the shooting began which took five weeks to complete.[4] The special effects on the cursed videotape and some parts in the films was shot on a 35 mm film which was passed on in a laboratory in which a computer added a 'grainy' effect.[5] Another part of the film in which extended visual effects were used is the part in which the ghost of Sadako Yamamura climbs out the television. First, they shot the Kabuki Theater actress Rie Inoo walking backwards in a jerky, exaggerated motion. They then played the film in reverse to portray an unnatural looking walk for Sadako.[6]The close-up of Sadako's eye which appears towards the end of the film - and also on the cover of the UK DVD release by Tartan[7] - was actually performed by a male crew member rather than Inoo herself.[6]
Upon release in Japan, Ring became the highest grossing film in the country.[6]
It garnered mostly positive reviews; Rotten Tomatoes lists it with a "freshness" rating of 97 percent, with 23 of 24 reviews positive.[8]
Critics praised the film for creating a spooky atmosphere. Michael Thomson of BBC Films rated it four out of five stars, saying: "Its story is constructed around a beautifully simple idea, that those who watch an extremely unnerving, grainy video (and receive a phone call immediately afterwards), will die exactly one week later, always with a severely twisted, freaked-out expression on their faces."[9] Christopher Null of filmcritic.com said, "Ring is very atmospheric and often creepy, especially in its last half hour, but it's hardly chilling enough to keep you up at night."[10]
Ring was ranked #69 in Empire magazines "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010.[11]
There are two sequels shot in Japan: Rasen (also from 1998, aka Spiral) and Ring 2 (from 1999, and which was not based on Suzuki's works), as well as a prequel, Ring 0: Birthday (2000). There was also a Korean remake (called Ring in Korea and The Ring Virus abroad). A video game, known as The Ring: Terror's Realm in the U.S., was also released in 2000 for the Dreamcast.
In 2002, an American adaptation was created, The Ring and gained a sequel, The Ring Two. The first film follows the original's closely although plot elements are altered or added in and Sadako Yamamura is reformed into Samara Morgan. A third film, titled The Ring 3D has been announced.
The international success of the Japanese films launched a revival of horror filmmaking in Japan that resulted in such pictures as Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 film Pulse (known as Circuit (回路 Kairo) in Japan), Takashi Shimizu's The Grudge (呪怨 Juon) (2000), Hideo Nakata's Dark Water (仄暗い水の底から Honogurai mizu no soko kara, literally The Depths of Dark Water), also based on a short story by Suzuki), and Higuchinsky's Uzumaki (2000, aka Vortex, based on the Junji Itō horror manga of the same name).
Most of the Ring stories also appeared as manga novels.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
