Director Hideo Nakata single-handedly kicked started the J-horror movement after making the highest grossing film in Japanese history, Ringu. By merely revamping the traditional ghost story, he subtly posits a renunciation of technology while successfully pulling the viewer into the work, both literally and aesthetically. What results is nothing more than one of the most polished, exquisite works of horror in recent decades.
Upon Tomoko Oishi’s (Yuko Takeuchi) death, her aunt, Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima), a journalist, learns that three of her niece’s friends died at the same time as well, all with the same look of terror atrophied on their faces as did Tomoko. After locating the video tape that her niece supposedly watched that is said to kill anyone who viewed it seven days after their initial screening, Asakawa watches the cassette, as does her ex-husband, Professor Ryuji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada), and her son, Yoichi (Rikiya Otaka). Asakawa and Takayama then race against time as they attempt to unravel clues within the video in hopes of lifting the curse before their inevitable demise.
Ringu’s simplistic outline contributes largely to its success in that Nakata merely sets the traditional Japanese ghost story in contemporary society, replete with many of the more anxiety-inducing issues and concerns of the late twentieth century: single motherhood, the malevolent use of technology, and infidelity and murder.
In respect to the latter, we are lead to initially believe that the one responsible for the cursed video tape is Shizuko Yamamura (Masako), who died forty years before, after her father, Takashi Yamamura (Yoichi Numata), paraded her around, exploiting her extrasensory abilities. Once the community renounced her gifts, Shizuko committed suicide by jumping into a volcano. She left behind a daughter, Sadako (Rie Inou), whose abilities were even greater in that she was able to speak to the sea–an ominous presence which had taken one member of the Yamamura family for every passing year since Takashi’s time. Heihachiro Ikuma (Daisuke Ban) is the illegitimate father of Sadako and as a consequence of his affair with Shizuko, he was dismissed from his university post as professor. Sighting Sadako as the figurehead of his failure, he kills her by throwing her into a well.
This serves as the segue to Nakata’s masterfully subtle indictment of technology in that Sadako, being aligned with her environment so much so that she can speak, in Takashi’s terms, “not in a human language” with the sea. Aside from her psychogenetic inheritance from her mother, Sadako also houses Nensha, the ability to psychically burn images from her mind onto objects in the external world. As such, in retribution to her (as well as her mother’s) untimely death, she mentally fabricates a plague in the form of a cursed video tape–the antithesis of her and her mother’s connection with nature in that the cassette serves as a symbol of the advent and perpetual advancement of technology in the modern world, the philosophical underpinning of the antagonist which prompted their murders.
Nakata compliments his themes by paralleling characters. Both Takashi and Asakawa are single mothers, the fathers of their children being professors, one of which–Takayama–also possesses the gift of extrasensory perception. Yet, the director tightens his narrative even more in that the suspense is compounded by time markers which continually dwindle and appear more frequently as the central figures race against the clock. Furthermore, and perhaps Nakata’s most effective technique in that it aligns his viewer with the plights of Takayama and Asakawa, is his screening of the cursed video during the film, thus prompting a sense of dread in his audience as a consequence. Yet, more subtle than his repudiation of technology is his positing that the curse will continue to perpetuate itself as his caustic, rationalistically egotistical chain letter ending brings the film to a bleak, yet honest, conclusion.
What makes Hideo Nakata’s Ringu more daunting after its viewing is the knowledge that the figure of Shizuko is based on a real person, Mifune Chizuko. During the beginning of the twentieth century, after a demonstration of her extrasensory abilities to the public, she was denounced and, like her fictional counterpart, committed suicide. However, Nakata resists attempting to remain honest to his source material as he patiently crafts one of the most creative, scathing social commentaries upon technology in recent times while implementing the horror genre as a metaphor for the events contained within his narrative.
-Egregious Gurnow
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