Macabre…ish Horror Review: Rings

Rings, 2017/ 1 hr 42 min

On a flight, just before landing in Seattle, a copy of the tape is broadcast through the flight instruments and in the cabin. Someone on the plane has seen the tape and he has 5 minutes until his time is up. The plane immediately starts having problems, including black water pouring from the bathrooms and flies coming out of the cock pit. And on the monitor is Samara, climbing through through the screen.

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A professor, Gabriel (Johnny Galecki) is doing research called The Samara Enigma: Neuroscience of the Afterlife

and he has students volunteering to watch the video and telling them it’s the doorway between life and death, they can prove the soul exists. Just watch it, copy it and pass it on, if they can.

He has a whole floor dedicated to this research and you have to have an elevator key to get there. As soon as the doors open, at the end of the hall is a tv and a camera, pointing at the watcher.

In one of the rooms are names of participants with clocks counting down. And sometimes a hysterical participant with little time left shows up in desperation.  A girlfriend, Julia (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz), of one of the subjects, Holt (Alex Roe), goes looking for him to find him a part of the study and she becomes his tail and watches it to save him. After she sees another subject, Skye (Amy Teegarden) succumb to Samara (Bonnie Morgan).

Gabriel was trying to prove what he believed but discovered something else instead. Now he simply facilitates passing copies down the line. Except something has changed, Julia’s version won’t copy and her video has a slight change in it, a bird she saw die earlier that day.

She sees hints in the video and goes to the church that shows up in the video. It is no longer a church and the caretaker is a blind former priest named Galen (Vincent D’onofrio). Julia breaks in later and finds out quite a lot about the caretaker, where Samara is secreted and why. He’s a bad man, all of this is his fault and he almost kills her but instead finds out the blinding himself will not save him after all.

This is an interesting direction of The Ring franchise and I can totally see this happening in real life. The great cast really sold this premise. The pacing is really fast, the cinematography and graphics are good. There’s a very violent seen at the end between Galen and Julia so, trigger warning. I enjoyed this movie!