THE RING 2 (1999)
3 out of ****
Starring Nakatani Miki, Matsushima Nanako, Sanada Hiroyuki;
Directed by Hideo Nakata;
Written by Hiroshi Takahashi, from a novel by Koji Suzuki;
Cinematography by Junichiro Hayashi
The producers of the RING movies have evidently done their economics homework. They know that if a movie surpasses box office records throughout South-East Asia, as THE RING did, then a sequel should reap immense financial rewards. And so they put out a sequel, which wasn't hard to do, because the ending of the first movie is plenty ambiguous. And if the sequel is open-ended, then there is always the possibility of a third movie, and more profits. And so THE RING 2, sequel to the splendid original, is open-ended, and THE RING 3 is already in pre-production, even though the first two movies have only just premiered in North America, and it would all seem like a blatant cash-grab, if the movies weren't so good.
THE RING 2, remarkably, is almost as effective as its predecessor--indeed, if you are not already familiar with the basic material, it may be just as fine, although I would guess that proper appreciation of THE RING 2 depends on knowledge of the original. That film introduced us to the memorable figure of Sadako, a white-garbed ghost with a twisted posture and long black hair which obscures her face in an indefinably sinister manner, and to the deranging video tape which heralds her presence and signals to those who watch it that they have only a week left to live.
In THE RING, a journalist and her ex-husband went looking for Sadako after seeing the tape. The focus here is on the journalist's young son, one of her co-workers, and the ex-husband's teaching assistant, as they too come under Sadako's curse and seek to extricate themselves before she claims them. The sequel does its best to take the material in new directions, following up on loose ends from the original to provide us with new twists such as a mute possessed child, some pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo about "energy transference," and a woman who can see into the next world.
Nevertheless, the strengths of THE RING 2 are, by and large, the strengths of the original. There is the seriously creepy presence of Sadako. There are images from the disquieting video tape, judiciously recycled to great effect. And there is Hideo Nakata's direction, which is crisp, methodical, and inobtrusively superb, although there are moments in THE RING 2 which verge on cliché and diminish its understated power. The least successful scene, to my mind, is a close-up of unconvincing blood seeping from the body of a woman run over by a car, complete with the dead woman's voice whispering spectrally on the soundtrack. But such moments of stock-in-trade triteness are rare: mostly, the movie is unaffected and convincing.
Its success depends on maintaining that tone of conviction. Nakata approaches his material with unblinking solemnity, depicting it as if he believes in it. He does not undercut the suspense with overplayed humour or self-referential winks. The sense of menace is never diminished. Early on, there is an unnerving set-piece in the neurological ward of a hospital: a patient affected by Sadako's spirit causes other women in the ward to have violent hysterical fits, while the TV in the corner crackles with static and scenes from the video interrupt the broadcast. The sense of disruption this scene causes does not abate afterward. Nakata proceeds smoothly from one scene to the next, always with the same meticulous mise-en-scene, and the unwavering consistency of tone allows earlier events to inform and amplify those that follow.
The end result is that the movie is chilling even when we can guess what's coming--the horror depends not on surprise but on intensity. Nakata has, unfortunately, refused to direct the third installment, although it is probably a wise decision. He has given us two remarkable films, but now it's time to turn out the lights. The producers, so concerned with economics of sequels, would do well to consider the law of diminishing returns, which applies to art as it does to commerce. The first time, it was very scary. The second time, it is kinda scary. The third time, it will be redundant.
Subjective Camera (subjective.freeservers.com) Movie Reviews by David Dalgleish (daviddalgleish@yahoo.com)
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