The Ring Two (2005)

There is a scene in The Ring Two in which wild deer attack a station wagon on a rural road, and the film offers no explanation for it whatsoever. This is the movie's entire operating principle. Hideo Nakata, who directed the original Japanese Ring, returns to shepherd the American sequel, and what he delivers is a moody, damp, largely incoherent exercise in atmosphere. Naomi Watts stares into middle distance with admirable commitment. A bathtub fills with water. Sissy Spacek appears for one scene in a psychiatric hospital and vanishes. Nobody learns anything. The screenplay by Ehren Kruger moves from set piece to set piece with the grim determination of a commuter who has missed his stop and refuses to ask for directions.

The film concerns a cursed videotape, a drowned girl, and a mother's efforts to prevent a dead child from occupying her living son. It is, in other words, a story about possession, grief, and the failure of institutions to protect anyone. What it is not is a vehicle for social instruction. The cast is uniformly white and assembled with no discernible representational ambition. Rachel Keller works as a reporter, and the film frames her maternity as a site of horror and suspected child abuse, which is a tradition considerably older than any contemporary gender politics. A psychiatrist raises postpartum depression as an accusation. The movie treats this as plot mechanics, not as advocacy.

One searches the runtime for a thesis about power, capital, or the climate and finds only wet carpet and a well. There is no messaging, no sermon, no moment where the film pauses to instruct its audience on how to live. It simply wants to frighten us, and mostly fails. The result is a relic of a simpler cinematic era, a sequel that exists because the first one made money, and which asks nothing of us beyond ninety minutes and a tolerance for nonsensical deer.