Ringu

Ringu (リング, '' Ringu''^?) is a 1998 Japanese horror and mystery film directed by Hideo Nakata. It is the adaptation of the novel of the same name written by Kōji Suzuki which, in turn, is based on the Japanese folktale Banchō Sarayashiki. Some stars of the film are Nanako Matsushima, Hiroyuki Sanada and Rikiya Otaka who play the members of a broken family cursed by playing a videotape on the television. a remake in the United States under the name of The Ring (2002) giving rise to a film franchise of notable international success.

The film is the most profitable horror film in Japan, grossing 15.9 billion yen, and is also considered the scariest horror film in Japan according to the Oricon research. She obtained 1 nomination, for best actress at the Japanese Film Academy Awards, and 6 awards, highlighting the Most Popular Film Award from the Japanese Academy or the Best Film Award at the Sitges Festival.

Plot

Two teenagers, Masami (Hitomi Satō) and Tomoko (Yūko Takeuchi), are talking about a cursed videotape. Recorded by a child in Izu, the legend says that if it is reproduced, it kills the viewer seven days after seeing it. Tomoko reveals that a week ago, she and three of her friends watched a strange tape and received a call after seeing it. As the tape is similar to the one mentioned in the story, Masami and Tomoko realize that they were sentenced to die. After a few haunting moments, Tomoko mysteriously dies, with Masami witnessing the horrifying scene.

Some days later Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima), an investigative reporter, discovers the cursed videotape and also about the popularity of the videocurse among teenagers. She discovers that her niece Tomoko and three other friends of hers mysteriously died at the same time, on the same night, their faces twisted into a rictus of fear. She also discovers that Masami, the girl who was with Tomoko when she died, has gone mad while being committed to a mental hospital. After analyzing Tomoko's photographs from the previous week, Reiko estimates that the four youths stayed in a rented cabin in Izu. She is eventually shocked to discover a photo of the teens with their faces misshapen.

Later Reiko goes to Izu and finds an unlabeled tape in the reception room of the cabin rental where the teens stayed. She takes the tape and sees her inside cabin B4, witnessing a series of disturbing images. As she watches the tape, Reiko receives a phone call from which she deduces that the curse has been activated and she has one week to live. On the first day, Reiko asks for help from her ex-husband, Ryuji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada), who photographs Reiko and they both discover that the woman's face is deformed in the photograph like teenagers, which confirms that Reiko is really cursed. A day later they find a hidden message embedded within the tape.

Sadako Yamamura (Rie Inou) walks out of Ryuji's television and sets a deadline to kill him. Just one day later Ryuji and Reiko find out that the loss of her daughter Shizuko (Masako), Sadako must have made the videotape. Determined, both return to Izu with the hypothesis that Sadako is dead and that it is her vengeful spirit that killed the teenagers. The duo then discover a well under cabin B4 and realize through a vision that Sadako's father killed her and dumped her body into a well. They try to empty the well and find Sadako's body in an attempt to appease her spirit. Reiko finds Sadako's body. When nothing happens to her, they believe the curse is broken.

Everything seems to be going well until, the next day, Sadako crawls out of Ryuji's TV and kills him. Desperate to find a cure to save her child, Reiko realizes what she did but Ryuji did, copy the tape. With a VCR and Ryuji's copy of the tape, Reiko runs to her son in an attempt to save him, realizing that this is an endless cycle; the tape must always be copied and played to ensure the survival of viewers.

Cast

Production

After the initial success of the novel Ringu, written by Kôji Suzuki, the production company Kadokawa Shōten decided to make a film adaptation of the novel. The film's screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi and director Hideo Nakata collaborated on the script after reading the novel and watching a previous television adaptation, Ringu: Kanzen-ban (1995)., produced by Fuji Television Network with Chisui Takigawa directing. However, the television version was re-edited and released on VHS under a new title, Ringu: Kanzen-ban (Ring: The Complete Edition). Nakata and Takahashi did not indicate which version of the TV movie they watched. For the script of the film, Takahashi and Nakata made some substantial changes compared to the original plot: they changed the gender of the protagonist (from male to female), name (from Kazuyuki Asakawa to Reiko Asakawa), marital status (from married to divorced). and the child's sex and name (from daughter Yoko to son Yoichi).

With a budget of $1.2 million, the entire production took nine months and five weeks. According to director Nakata, the script and pre-production process took three to four months, filming took five weeks and post-production four months.

The special effects on the cursed videotape and some other sequences were shot on 35mm film to which a team later added a grainy effect in the lab. One part of the film where more visual effects were used is where the ghost of Sadako Yamamura comes out of the television. First, they filmed the Kabuki stage actress, Rie Inō, walking backwards with exaggerated, jerky movements. They then played the tape in reverse to depict Sadako's unnatural-looking walk. The close-up of Sadako's eye, which appears towards the end of the film and on the UK DVD cover, was taken from a male crew member rather than Inō herself.

Reception

After being released in Japan Ringu became the film with the highest grossing figures for a film in the country.

Among professional critics and on cinematographic information portals, the film obtains a majority of positive comments. On IMDb, with 70,300 ratings, it obtains an average score of 7.2 out of 10. (27th position) and "Best Horror Movies" (115th position), it has an average rating of 6.7 out of 10 computed 46,715 votes. In the critics aggregator Rotten Tomatoes it reaches the rating of "fresh" in 96% of 23 professional reviews (whose consensus highlights "Ringu combines supernatural elements with anxieties about modern technology in truly terrifying and unnerving ways") and 81% of the more than 25,000 evaluations of its users.

FilmAffinity highlights in its report that it is a "cult film in Japan -later a sequel and a prequel were even made in the Asian country-, in 2002 Hollywood made a remake (The Ring) which also achieved enormous success both in the United States and in Europe". Miguel Ángel Palomo in the newspaper El País highlighted that "the outbreak that oriental horror In recent years he owes a lot to Hideo Nakata and even more to this work, one of the most disturbing in recent years. An absorbing terrifying drama(...) With hardly any stridency, under the icy images of "The Ring" beats the deepest and most dizzying horror". The magazine Fotogramas gave it 2 out of 5 stars, showing a parallelism with the film Videodrome "more modest than David Cronenberg's, The Ring proposes a technological fable whose moral is close to that of Videodrome: that our well-loved videotapes, which so enrich our spirit and our knowledge, are, deep down, malignant sources of fulminantly terminal disease& #34;.

Critics praised the film for creating a spooky atmosphere. Michael Thomson of BBC Films rated it 4 out of 5 stars, saying: "its story is built around a wonderfully simple idea, which to those who see it is very unnerving, grainy video (and getting a phone call immediately after), will die exactly one week later, always with a severely bent, startled-out expression on their faces". Christopher Null of filmcritic.com said, "Ring is very atmospheric and often creepy, especially in its last half hour, but it's hard to relax enough to keep up at night" 3. 4;. Peter Bradshaw for The Guardian gave it 4 stars out of 5 indicating "the original and the best: a genuinely terrifying film.(...) It has indescribably disturbing moments that scared the hell out of me". Peter Travers at Rolling Stone gave it 4 stars out of 4 noting "its not so much the gore that interests Nakata as the reporter investigates, but the subtle threat that gets her through the night awake and in cold sweats". Daniel Fierman for Entertainment Weekly praised the pacing "has an intelligent narrative device.(...) Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to to be in the corner of my office in a fetal position, rocking slowly".

Premieres

Officers

Country	Date
Japan	31 January 1998
Hong Kong	29 April 1999
Singapore	12 August 1999
South Korea	11 December 1999
United Kingdom	18 August 2000
Spain	24 November 2000
France	11 April 2001
Australia	13 September 2001
Denmark	28 September 2001
Poland	15 November 2002
Argentina	22 January 2004
Mexico	6 May 2005 (DVD Direct Trainer).

Festivals and Others

Country	Date	Festival/Evento/Other
Spain	12 October 1999	Sitges Film Festival
Finland	27 September 2000	Helsinki International Film Festival
Norway	19 November 2000	Oslo International Film Festival
Sweden	28 April 2001	Upsala Terror Film Festival
Israel	22 August 2002	Television premiere
Argentina	19 September 2002	From Kurosawa to Kitano: 50 Years of Japanese Film
Poland	10 October 2002	Warsaw Film Festival
Philippines	4 December 2002	Manila
Germany	15 May 2003	Premiere on DVD
Italy	21 May 2003	Video premiere
Denmark	6 July 2003	J-Horror Cavalcade
Philippines	20 August 2003	Film FestivalManila
Sweden	18 April 2004	Television premiere
Hungary	23 March 2005	Video premiere

Sequels and adaptations

Sequels made in Japan

• Rasen (1998). Also known as Spiral or Ringu: Spiral.
• Ringu 2 (1999). It is not based on Suzuki's works.
• Sadako 3D (2012).
• Sadako 3D 2 (2014).
• Sadako vs. Kayako (2016). Also known as The Grudge vs. The Ring.
• Sadako (2019). Also known as The Aro: Final Chapter.

Prequel in Japan

• Ringu 0: Bâsudei (2000). Also known as The Ring 0: Birthday.

South Korean version

• The Ring Virus (1999).

US versions

• The Ring (2002).
• The Ring Two (2005).
• Rings (2017). Also known as The Aro 3.

Chinese versions

• Bunshinsaba vs Sadako (2016).
• Bunshinsaba vs Sadako 2 (2017). Also known as Bunshinsaba vs Sadako: The Return of Evil.
• The Perilous Internet Ring (2020). Also known as The Ring: Resurrection.

The international success of Japanese Cinema launched a horror film renaissance in Japan that spawned other films:

• Kairo (2000) of Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
• Ju-on 1 (2003) of Takashi Shimizu, from which the series of films arose Ju-on.
• Dark Water (2002) by Hideo Nakata, known as Agua Turbia or In the depths of dark water.
• Uzumaki (2000) by Andrey Higuchinsky.

Most of the Ringu stories appeared as manga novels.

Awards

Japan Academy Awards

Brussels Fantasy Festival

Fantasia Film Festival

Nat Film Festival

Catalan Film Festival - Sitges