The phone rings the moment the tape stops. That is the hook of The Ring, and it is still the best thing in it. Gore Verbinski’s 2002 film hands Naomi Watts a videotape, a seven-day clock and a drowned girl, and for about two-thirds of its 115 minutes it runs on that premise with real force.
Then it explains itself, and the explaining is where the film thins out.
Trailer, via Warner Bros. Entertainment.
Rachel Keller Watches the Tape
Watts plays Rachel Keller, a Seattle journalist. Her niece Katie, played by Amber Tamblyn, dies the same night she and three friends are talking about an urban legend: watch the tape, and you die a week later. Katie watched it seven days earlier with those friends. All four are dead by morning.
At the funeral, Katie’s mother Ruth — Rachel’s sister, played by Lindsay Frost — asks Rachel to look into it. Rachel finds that Katie’s friends died in bizarre accidents at the same moment Katie did. That detail is what turns a grieving aunt into an investigator.
She drives to Shelter Mountain Inn, where the teenagers watched the tape. She finds it. She watches it.
The imagery on the tape is strange and frightening, and the film is smart enough not to over-explain it yet. Then the room phone rings. The caller whispers one thing: “Seven days.”
Rachel is skeptical at first. She does not stay skeptical long. The occurrences start, and they are linked to the tape.
Noah Clay, Aidan Keller and the Copy
Rachel pulls in her ex-husband Noah, a video analyst played by Martin Henderson. He watches the tape. She makes him a copy. That decision is the film’s cold little engine: Rachel is not just solving a mystery, she is recruiting new victims to buy herself time.
Their eight-year-old son Aidan, played by David Dorfman, watches the tape too. The film does not linger on how, or on what Rachel feels about it. It just moves.
Rachel identifies a woman on the tape: Anna Morgan, a horse breeder. Anna killed herself after some of her horses drowned themselves off Moesko Island. Rachel heads there to talk to Anna’s widower, Richard, played by Brian Cox.
On the ferry crossing, a horse kills itself by jumping overboard. The film stages it plainly, and it lands harder than most of the tape imagery does.
Moesko Island and Samara Morgan
On the island, Rachel learns what Anna went through. After four consecutive miscarriages, Anna adopted a young girl named Samara, played by Daveigh Chase.
Samara could etch images onto objects and into people’s minds. She used it on her parents. She used it on their horses. That is the origin of the tape, and it is also the moment The Ring stops being a movie about a curse and starts being a movie about a family.
Meanwhile Noah goes to Eola Psychiatric Hospital and finds a psychiatric file on Samara. Inside it is a missing video — one that Richard Morgan was the last person to see. Back at the Morgan house, Rachel finds a fake birth certificate proving Samara was not the biological child of Richard and Anna.
The plot keeps opening outward. The dread does not keep pace.
Where The Ring Spends Its Seven Days
| Day | What happens | Who is on the clock |
|---|---|---|
| Night of the legend | Katie and Becca discuss the tape | Katie, Becca |
| Seven days after Katie’s viewing | Katie and three friends die | Katie, three friends |
| After the funeral | Ruth asks Rachel to investigate | Rachel |
| Shelter Mountain Inn | Rachel finds and watches the tape | Rachel |
| Immediately after | Phone rings; caller whispers “Seven days” | Rachel |
| Days after | Noah watches; Rachel copies the tape for him | Noah |
| Same stretch | Aidan watches the tape | Aidan |
| Ferry to Moesko Island | A horse jumps overboard and dies | Rachel |
| Moesko Island | Rachel learns about Samara’s adoption | Rachel |
| Eola Psychiatric Hospital | Noah finds Samara’s file and a missing video | Noah |
The table is the film’s actual structure, and it is a good one. A clock, a cast of people who each watched the same thing, and a mother who has to solve it before her son’s week runs out.
The Tape Versus the Explanation
| Element | The tape | The explanation |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Strange, frightening imagery | Samara’s psychic ability |
| How it kills | Unseen force, seven days later | Images etched into minds |
| Who made it | Unknown when Rachel first watches | Samara, per her file |
| What it costs | A week of life | A dead girl, dead horses, two dead parents |
| What it withholds | Nearly everything | Nothing |
That last row is the problem. The Ring works while it withholds. Once Samara’s ability is spelled out — she could etch images onto objects and into people’s minds — the tape stops being an object of dread and becomes a mechanism with a manual.
The cast is doing real work around that. Watts carries the film as a reporter who is competent and still out of her depth, and Cox gives Richard Morgan a hard, unhelpful edge that the movie needs. Dorfman’s Aidan is eerie without being cute about it.
But the film’s best asset is the one it uses least: the phone call. A room phone ringing right after the tape ends, and a voice saying “Seven days,” does more than any of the imagery on the tape itself. It is a mechanic, not a monster, and mechanics are scarier.
The Ring grossed $249.3 million worldwide, won Best Horror Film and Best Actress for Watts at the 29th Saturn Awards, and set off a run of American remakes of Asian horror films, including The Grudge in 2004 and Dark Water in 2005.
It is a 2002 American supernatural horror film, written by Ehren Kruger, directed by Verbinski, and a remake of the 1998 Japanese film, itself based on Koji Suzuki’s 1991 novel. DreamWorks released it in the United States on October 18, 2002.
The tagline is “Before you die, you see.” The film would be better if it trusted that more and explained less.
The Ring is a strong premise, a strong central performance and a weak third act. It is worth watching for the hour where it refuses to tell you what the tape is. It is worth remembering for the phone.
5.7 of 10.
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