I’m not really an aficionado of horror films, but I do appreciate really good ones, so naturally I have always been interested in Ringu, the famous Japanese horror film from quite a few years back. Well, I finally caught up with it on Netflix, and thought I would share my thoughts about it, especially in the wake of the current critical acclaim of another B-grade horror flick: Black Swan.

As far as horror quality goes, Ringu does a lot of things right. The images are genuinely creepy, they are always set up well, and they are not overused – in this way Ringu is already head of 95% of the entire horror genera! The thing with the photos is brilliantly done, and scary. The video itself is done so well that as you watch it over and over it starts to disturb you more and more, and the way certain images start to reappear to the main characters in the day-to-day-lives is very shocking. The final horrific image in the end (I’m not giving it away, even though I was probably the last person on earth who had not seen it) is pretty up-there in terms of fry-your-mind creepiness – I struggled a bit watching it, I’ll admit.

The other thing about Ringu is that it is actually pretty timeless. The locations (the camp, the island) still look good after 14 years – nothing seems dated. This is a testament to the skill of the filmmakers. They showed a lot of restraint. I also liked the performances and the way the characters were drawn. The husband is perhaps a bit too enigmatic (I was not even sure who he was for a long time) but he’s such a cool dude, played by a very warm actor, and in the end you just go with it.

So what holds Ringu back? Well, first, it is very definitely a B-thriller – despite the timelessness of the settings, you can’t deny that the whole thing is shot a bit like an after-school special. But a larger problems for me is that the final realization about who gets killed and why just seems too light and inconsequential compared to the rest of the film. It feels cheap, almost like a cop-out. The film needed a bigger ending, kind of like the horror classic The Changling (which Ringu was definitely influenced by), and in fact it had such an ending right at its fingertips, when the couple tries to find the remains of the girl. But perhaps I’m being too picky, for the story as-is sets up the wammy scene at the end and makes the final horrific image possible. It’s a tough call.

Ringu: If you have not seen it, rent it and check it out. It’s better than most horror films out there, quite a bit better.