My only previous experience with reviewing Japanese live-action cinema is two films released by Arrow Video in 2021: The Invisible Man Appears and The Human Fly. I remember my main issue with them was their attempt to capitalise on a lot of American successes with sci-fi and horror, without stamping their own vision on those genres.
Thankfully, Ringu is a great example of what happens when Japan carves out their own unique style different from Hollywood. At a time where Hollywood’s horror was all about slashers and gore and in-your-face terrors, Ringu prioritised paranoia over persistent jump scares, suspense over shock value. In many ways, it was influential to Western cinema as well – look no further than The Blair Witch Project, released the very next year, which left all of the terrifying monstrosities to the audience’s imagination.
Ringu is dedicated to its central mystery. In many ways, the plot plays less like a horror and more like a police procedural. A journalist begins to investigate the death of her niece and three friends after they watched a mysterious videotape. It’s a solid setup, with a really strong cold open that hooks the viewer with the immediate tension of a ringing phone, and a TV turning off by itself.
It’s also a really intricate story too. Sometimes horror films can be style over substance (that’s not necessarily a bad thing) but Ringu is a film that you need to pay close attention to in order to understand some of the backstory behind the videotape. I always have a real appreciation for films that feel longer than they are but in a good way, and Ringu is one of those – it gets a lot done in 95 minutes and the story is really tight and involving.
The moment we see the videotape is where the film really clicks into gear. It’s a bizarre montage of black-and-white footage and glitches that achieves the desired effect of making the audience feel as uneasy as possible, and reminds me of the Blair Witch Project in its ability to take a lot of disconnected and discordant imagery and turn it into a tangible source of scares. The ringing phone is a great bit of sound design as well – it’s a normal ringtone but it’s played just loudly and harshly enough to make your hairs stand on end, and it makes for one of the most intense ticking clocks in all of cinema.
Ringu is lightning in a bottle in many different ways, but its main achievement is writing a winding, gripping narrative that functions as a fantastic ghostly procedural
Strangely enough, the main duo of this journalist and her ex-husband don’t seem too stressed about their impending doom, and only feel slightly creeped out with the prospect of being confronted with their mortality when they literally have minutes left to solve the mystery. It’s definitely in the back of their minds, but it feels a little odd to have protagonists that feel this nonplussed about being offed by some evil spirit, especially protagonists who are this devoted to investigating their story. With that said, this decision actually works for the better in the long-term. The film isn’t distracting itself with melodrama and moping, and stays consistently focused on its central mystery, which it knows is easily its strongest element.
Ringu is, of course, primarily a horror film, despite what my fixation on the mystery procedural plotline would have you believe, and it knows how to make the audience piss themselves in terror once they’ve been sucked in. The flashbacks that occur about halfway through are truly harrowing, with manic hysteria over some unexplainable act of murder and a young girl screaming with far more power and evil in her voice than any young girl should be able to emit. The film is obsessed with things that seem uncanny, there are sometimes pauses between lines that go on longer than they perhaps should, but every opportunity to generate horror that the film has, it takes.
The performances are also remarkably strong here too. Nanoka Matsushima as lead protagonist Reiko balances being a down-to-earth single mother and a paranoid journalist admirably, and nails the moments of duality when these separate character facets bleed into each other e.g where she sees her son watching the video and has to put on a brave face to disguise the fear gripping her. In a movie centered around a supernatural cursed videotape, you need some realism and immersion, and Matsushima brings this to the table in a really mature way.
It’s not to say the film isn’t without some occasional horror cliches, and the most notable one present here is easily the false ending. Films such as Poltergeist and Insidious spring to mind as examples of this: just when you thought it was over, the movie’s going to shock the life out of you once again. However, it doesn’t feel cheap when Ringu does it – it actually makes sense in the grander scheme of the plot, and might be a detail that some viewers pick up on when watching for the first time. It delivers us a fantastic scare, which is probably the horror highlight of the whole film, and ends with a jaw dropping open ending that throws the morality of our main character into doubt. Brilliant stuff.
I don’t think there’s much more to say about Ringu, as it’s like lightning in a bottle. There were many attempts at continuations of the story, mostly done by director Hideo Nakata himself, as well as two American films and a 2017 reboot that failed to recapture what worked like a charm about the original. Ringu is lightning in a bottle in many different ways, but its main achievement is writing a winding, gripping narrative that functions as a fantastic ghostly procedural, and also being able to use great direction and sound design to get as much horror out of its story as possible. It’s not the videotape gimmick that makes Ringu special – what makes it special is that it’s a really good film.
Ringu is out on (Limited Edition) 4K Arrow Video Blu-Ray
Alex’s Archive: Ringu (1998)
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