A little girl with amnesia is found wandering the streets and is taken to a children’s hospital for observation. Her friendly doctor tries to reach her and help jog her memory. It seems that her mother tried to burn her alive in their apartment believing she was the reincarnation of the evil ghost girl, Sadako. When the doctor’s YouTuber brother makes a cursed viral video from inside the apartment, he mysteriously disappears a week later. It’s then up to the good doctor to stop the curse and save her brother.
The director of the original Ringu (and the awful American sequel, The Ring Two), Hideo Nakata returned for this reboot of the series. Like Sadako 3D 2, it’s more of a creepy kid movie than a Ring flick. It also takes a while before Sadako finally comes crawling out the TV. Also, you’re forced to watch a long Found Footage sequence in order to gather vital plot information, which kinda sucks. The fact that snippets of this segment are often repeated to hammer home plot points that the audience has already figured out for themselves doesn’t help matters either.
While the pacing tends to be erratic, Nakata does give the film a sense of style, even if that doesn’t exactly translate into actual atmosphere (or scares). That said, the finale is solid, and if it inhabited a movie that didn’t dawdle so damned much in the first two acts (or at least was a good fifteen minutes shorter) we might’ve had something here. At any rate, the third act works, mostly due to the fact that it’s at the very least thematically interesting (the souls of unwanted children are using Sadako’s spirit as a vessel of revenge). It’s just a shame that the overall results are mixed at best. Still, it’s better than any of the American versions of The Ring by a long shot.
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