Film blogFilmThe Ring: one remake that outshines its original
Sickly cinematography, unsettling set pieces and an engulfing sense of horror, The Ring is a rare example of a Hollywood remake that beats its foreign counterpartThere aren't many people who'll own up to preferring a Hollywood remake of a foreign film, and usually with good reason. Anyone who sat through Diabolique waiting for the chills of Henri-George Clouzot's Les Diaboliques was sorely disappointed. As for The Vanishing – given that the entire point of the original was its bring-you-out-in-hives-scary ending, for the remake to completely alter said ending was to render the entire film worthless.
But there's one remake, based on an adored original, that I think outshines its source. Mine is not a popular view: in fact, when Gore Verbinski's The Ring was released in 2002, the general critical reaction was a shrug of disdain at its attempt to replicate the shocks of the Japanese Ringu. Our own Peter Bradshaw called it "disappointing, losing most of the original's flavour". The New York Times called it "devoid of feeling", the Village Voice said it was "like a Nine Inch Nails clip", while Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times felt it "teeters right on the edge of the ridiculous".
I seem to catch The Ring on TV every time I can't sleep. I must have seen it half a dozen times now. And not once has it helped me drop off: every time it leaves me feeling deeply uneasy. A couple of times, it's sent me scurrying back to the original to compare, and both times I've come away thinking that Ringu pales by comparison.
The difference, I think, is that Ringu is a shocking film, while The Ring is a horror film. Ringu seems almost like a David Lynch movie: a series of barely connected nightmares (though it's a model of coherence compared to its sequel). Because Ringu seems almost unanchored in reality, I find it harder to be scared by it. There are moments of absolute shock – anyone who doesn't jump out of their chair the first time they see its conclusion must have slush for blood – but I feel no sense of dread watching it. Just a mild irritation as I try to work out what the hell is going on.
The Ring, however, has me chilled from its beginning. There is an attempt at a plot in The Ring: one imagines that was a requirement of DreamWorks before they put the money up, because no big studio wants to send something absolutely incomprehensible out to the multiplexes. The plotting isn't perfect – there are places you could drive a whole fleet of 18-wheelers through its holes – but one can follow it, which means the horror descends gradually and engulfs the viewer, rather than coming down like a tonne of bricks a handful of times before being lifted again. And The Ring has its creepy set pieces, too – the berserk horse on the car ferry is as unsettling and inexplicable as anything in the original.
Credit, too, to the director of photography, Bojan Bazelli, for The Ring looks stunning. The remake is set in Seattle, the famously rainy city in the Pacific northwest of the US (the region is home to one of the world's two areas of temperate rainforest, the other being in New Zealand), and it rains for most of the picture. Bazelli films virtually all the daylight scenes with a green wash that makes what should feel healthy – the forest, and countryside of a region that isn't far short of being heaven on Earth – feel sickly and fetid. The green seems to symbolise a catastrophic fertility, life cycles speeded up so fast that decay has supplanted growth as the central fact of existence. And when you realise what's going into the water, you understand why the trees and leaves and grass can seem so malevolent.
Caveats? Of course I have some. The kid – the conduit for the nightmares, and the McGuffin to motivate Naomi Watts as the protagonist - is straight out of creepy child central casting. There's no need for Watts to have a romantic relationship. And I never quite know whether to laugh or hide behind the sofa when Brian Cox starts piling up the electrical appliances in his bathroom as the film builds towards its denouement. But still I'm scared, and I never stop being scared for the duration.
The Ring 2's on tonight on BBC1, and you know what – I suspect I'll be staying up again.
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