Rings (2017)

Rings arrives as the third entry in a franchise that has now spent fifteen years asking what happens when a cursed videotape meets a bored college student, and the answer, dispiritingly, is a research project. Julia, our protagonist, watches the tape, sees a door in a vision, and develops a Braille burn on her palm. The film treats this as an investigation. The characters call themselves the Sevens. A professor buys a VCR. The machinery of the plot grinds forward with the grim obligation of a sequel nobody requested, and we are left to admire the sheer administrative effort of it all.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is thin. The cast is white, led by Matilda Lutz and Alex Roe, and no color-conscious instinct troubles the proceedings. There are no queer characters, no racial themes, no economic critique, no environmental sermon. The cursed video goes viral in the final act, but this is a horror device, not a comment on late capitalism. Julia drives the story, which is a genre convention stretching back to the original, not a thesis. A blind man named Galen turns out to be the villain, and his blindness functions as a supernatural plot mechanism, not as representation of any community.

The film does offer Vincent D'Onofrio, a swarm of cicadas, and a finale involving rebirth that is loopier than the rest of the runtime deserves. It lectures no one. It moralizes about nothing. It simply exists, a competent piece of franchise maintenance that grossed eighty-three million dollars and earned a C-minus from audiences. In an era when even our horror films arrive with a message stapled to the poster, there is something almost restful about a movie this uninterested in improving us. It fails on its own modest terms, and it fails without agenda.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel", "book_adaptation"]}