Ringu series

(In French, On Cable TV, May 2020) Considering that I am one of those strange people who think that the American remake of The Ring is better than the Japanese original Ringu, you may safely disregard my opinions about its sequel Ringu 2. But here goes anyway: There are two giant traps in which horror movie sequels can fall, and Ringu 2 manages to hit both of them at once. The first is to redo the first film with a bigger budget; the second one is to expand the mythology, provide answers, add backstory and generally make a mess out of the simplicity that worked so well in the original. Combining the two means that re-threading the first film’s scares is not original, while what’s original is not that scary. Ringu 2 is not without some merit, but it’s ungainly, off-key and just plain insipid when it tries to weld its own additional ideas on the framework built by Ringu—like a rickety addition to an elegant building. Now, director Hideo Nakata does have a rough understanding about how to build a horror sequence, and that instinct probably saves Ringu 2 from an even worse assessment—but the result still isn’t particularly good, no matter whether you’re watching this on its own, or as a follow-up to one of the most highly regarded Japanese horror films of the 1990s.