Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on March 18, 2005, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
The creators of The Ring Two have done something that’s daring in this day and age—they’ve made a sequel that, in the end, is smaller than the original. In a climate where the prevailing trend is to pump up the thrills and incident in a genre follow-up, returning scripter Ehren Kruger and director Hideo Nakata, joining the U.S. franchise inspired by his own Japanese features, turn inward, sending Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) not on a quest to protect the world but an intimate struggle to save her son Aidan (David Dorfman). The result will probably disappoint a lot of teenage girls, and isn’t entirely successful in any case, but at least it demonstrates an ambition to create a new film that’s more than a simple repetition.
As the story opens, Rachel has moved away from Seattle to a small town in Oregon to begin a new life for herself and Aidan. The past creeps up on her when a couple of teenagers mess around with a certain cursed videotape, in a sequence that, refreshingly, plays with our expectations based on the first film instead of rehashing its basic concepts as a refresher course. When Rachel hears of the nasty aftermath, she realizes that Samara is still after her and, more specifically, her son, and the movie dispenses with the “you will die in seven days” motif to give the ghost girl a less random and more motivated target for her supernatural campaign.
Despite the change in emphasis, the first half of The Ring Two contains suggestions that the filmmaking team has, pardon the expression, gone to the well once too often. Perhaps it’s just that the Japanese style of fear filmmaking is approaching the point of oversaturation, but there’s an overfamiliarity to some of Nakata and Kruger’s tropes as they set up and develop their story. There’s even another hoofed animal freakout; echoing the original’s horse-on-the-ferry setpiece is an assault on Rachel and Aidan’s car by a herd of deer, though the attack is vividly staged. There’s also a bit too much narrative convenience to get the movie where it’s going; Rachel’s access to the tape’s young victims and the crime scene comes awfully easily.
In addition, as Ring Two heads toward the point of its story, the supporting characters are reduced to sideline status, particularly Simon Baker’s colorless role as Rachel’s editor, protector and would-be love interest. He’s purely functional, as are Elizabeth Perkins (as a psychiatrist who believes the suffering Aidan may be a victim of Rachel’s neglect), Gary Cole (who at least adds a bit of levity as a realtor cheerfully and obliviously hawking the old Morgan house) and even Sissy Spacek, who does what she can with her too-brief scene as an institutionalized woman who holds the keys to some of Samara’s secrets.
Her appearance does help establishes a subtle subtext that Nakata and Kruger weave into the tale, which pays off as the movie goes on. So do the strong performances by Watts, maintaining and deepening the combination of vulnerability and resolve she displayed in The Ring, and Dorfman, who conveys his growing possession by Samara’s spirit with a skill belying his young age. Their mother-and-son relationship is palpable and feels real, and once the other narrative threads are out of the way and the focus becomes Rachel’s staunch attempts to free Aidan from Samara’s clutches, The Ring Two begins to pay off emotionally. Nakata has always been one to keep things low-key, and though his staging of the FX setpieces is assured (including one involving a bathroom that floods from the top down), his best work here is in the quietly desperate moments of Rachel’s ordeal.
Which is not to say that he doesn’t go for heavy-duty frights at the climax, and while his scare tactics, once again, are familiar from the previous Ring and Ringu entries, the image of the rotted, bedraggled Samara crawling up and out of the well can still elicit the heebie-jeebies. Still, there’s only so much that can be done with her, and by the end of The Ring Two, some viewers may feel she has worn out her welcome. Indeed, at the close of this entry, it’s Rachel, not Samara, who has become the anchor of the Ring series, which is the chief way in which it has now distinguished itself from Nakata’s Ringu films. It also suggests that if there has to be a third American Ring (and there really shouldn’t), its makers would be wise to not take their cues from the Japanese Ring Ø, which explored Sadako’s background, and find new travails to plague Rachel instead.
