The family as a wounded thing, a broken thing, forms the emotional substance of the American remake of the immensely popular Japanese film Ringu, originally released in 1998.  With its subtext of neglected children and distant parents and their fragmenting relationships, the film tries to extend its reach into relatively introspective territory.   

The straining triangle between Rachel (Naomi Watts), Noah and their son Aidan (David Dorfman) is explicitly paralleled in the darkened Morgan family, Richard and Anna and their daughter Samara, herself a strange being sutured into the
world, suffering and causing suffering as a result.  The idea of family is a pained one in The Ring, a fragile, delicate balance which must be struck amid a whirlwind of obstacles, and the film deserves credit for exploring this complexity with a reservation toward dispensing the rote positivity, or at least the neatly resolved questioning one has come to expect from traditional Hollywood treatment of such material. This is not to say that the film is an intricate labyrinth of social critique, but rather one which gazes inward, albeit it fleetingly, with an unexpected intensity.

Director Gore Verbinski dips the film in the colors of a metallic despair, blues, grays and greens punctuated with holes of black: the blankness of television screens, the rearing shape of a horse, the darkness of a little girl's hair.  A steady Seattle rain falls throughout the film, between the towers of the city and across the ancient looking countryside. For a film in which a well is a wound in the earth, bleeding water, such a constant deluge is only appropriate for a world drowning in the eternal anger of a lost soul. 

Despite these general successes, if there is a problem with The Ring it is that these very same visual and narrative strategies, no matter their occasional funereal grace, feel heavily manufactured. The film too often trades away the genuine desire to relate the grief and fear of an epic ghost story for the peaks and valleys of a roller coaster, forcing the audience to jump with technical manipulations such as shock cuts emphasized by a screeching soundtrack and pointless payoffs when the images themselves lack any real horrific content. What is effectively disturbing about the film are the connotations of given images and moments one may ponder upon reflection, and this is certainly not something to be dismissed out of hand, but The Ring  occasionally cheapens itself so needlessly that one doesn't want to give the film that kind of credit.  At times, the quite effective textures of the film seem constantly in danger of being broken on the rack of popular consumption. 

The DVD of The Ring is even more uneven than its progenitor.  While the film handles the transition to the small screen surprisingly well, as is perhaps fitting considering its premise of the fearful instability of the televisual image, the DVD is shockingly barren.  Besides a "short film" and
a trailer for the original Japanese Ringu, the only other "special" extra is a hidden feature which allows the viewer to watch the complete version of the mysterious killer videotape. 

There is a clever conceit in regards to this latter extra, namely that the DVD is designed not to allow you to stop watching the videotape once you have started, thereby emphasizing its unearthly origin. Yet while this may be diverting the first time one accesses the feature, it runs rather dry after repeat viewings. The trailer for Ringu is ridiculously short and seems to be the international version rather than a domestic one, but most questionable of all is the inclusion of the "short film."  Really only an admittedly clever way to release additional footage and alternation scenes, the piece is hardly a short "film" created by director Verbinski and reeks of a rather smarmy marketing ploy to reel in excited viewers.  One doesn't learn anything more of substance about the backstory of The Ring, yet one may very well have learned a great deal from a commentary track or perhaps a few behind the scenes shorts, ideally one focusing on the difficulties and strategies of adapting another film from another national context and culture.

It is possible that the reason for the absence of these materials is the desire to situate the film in a context which does not call attention to itself as a fictional production -- with the result that the DVD is then transformed into something of a mysterious object itself. While I applaud these tentative motivations, at least in theory, anyone who takes the time to buy the disc is presumably already interested in the film and doesn't need much more of a gimmicky presentation to effect their appreciation, and anyone who is just casually renting it probably doesn't care either way. 

The film may not be damaged by so disappointing a DVD release, but it may give one pause when considering if they want to spend money on purchasing it.  If you don't have a serious interest in the film but wouldn't mind owning it anyway, wait until it goes on sale and you can find it in some super store movie bin. Then you certainly won't be disappointed.

(Released by Universal and rated "PG-13" for thematic elements, disturbing images, language and some drug references.)