The box office failure of JojiIida’s Rasen (1998), shot at the same time as and as a sequel to Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) led to Nakata returning to the haunted world of Sadako for this second sequel that ignores everything that happened in Rasen and picks up a couple of weeks after the first film ended. The full throttle plot is packed with incident and odd developments, not all of which particularly make sense, but this is a more ambitious film than Ringu. That it doesn’t match the first film for sheer terror is disappointing but there’s still plenty of interest here anyway.

The principal character this time is Mai Takano (Miki Nakatani), the assistant of ill-fated university lectorer Ryuji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada) who teams up with one of Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima) journalist colleagues Okazaki (Yurei Yanagi) in an effort to track down the missing woman and her young son Yoichi (Rikiya Otaka). Their investigations lead them to a high school student, Kanae Sawaguchi, who dies after watching the cursed tape; a doctor at a psychiatric hospital who is trying to use science to exorcise Masami Kurahashi (Hitomi Sato), the young girl who survived Sadako’s first manifestation at the start of the original film and who is now incarcerated at his psychiatric hospital; Reiko and Yoichi, the latter having developed powerful psychic abilities; and finally to Oshima Island for a final confrontation with Sadako.

Ringu 2-2.jpg

Trying to unravel the complexities of Ringu 2‘s labyrinthine plot is a fool’s game. There’s a huge amount going on here that is often sketched in very quickly, making it difficult at times to keep up with who’s doing what to who and where anyone is at any given time. But the ideas a fascinating and the film is none the less fascinating for being often impossible to work out. The arcane workings of Doctor Ishi Kawajiri (Fumiyo Kohinata) are straight out of the Nigel Kneale playbook, using science to try to capture the etheral force that manifests itself from time to time as Sadako and his final experiment, that sees Sadako’s coffin rise from a swimming pool, two of the protagonists commit suicide and two others transported into the well where, we learn at the beginning of the film, Sadako had survived for thirty years, is as bizarre on screen as it sounds. And it leads to the film’s most memorable moment, it’s equivalent of the crawling-from-the-TV scene in the first film – as the two survivors try to climb out of the well on a rope, Sadako emerges from the water and slowly begins climbing after them, only to enigmatically demand “why is it only you were saved?” before falling back into the water. Sadako’s clay-like, featureless face is glimpsed at last (probably unwisely) and her clammy, grasping hand is one of the film’s many grotesque touches.

Though the narrative tends to unravel fairly quickly, there are plenty of lovely little touches like this to keep the interest. The videotape of a teenaged girl being interviewed that gets caught in a loop, the girl slowly transforming into Sadako for example, or a nightmarish moment involving that mirror seen in the cursed videotape. Anad again, as in the first film, all of this supernatural weirdness is never questioned by any of the characters – the Ringu films exist in a world where people have psychic powers, ghosts exist, videotapes can transmit death curses and everyone just accepts all this like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Compare this to the often ludicrous lengths that the American remakes go to to try to rationalise the irrational.

Ringu 2-1.jpg

“Everyone’s got tapes that no-one knows what’s on them” notes someone early on and, like its predecessor, Ringu 2 trades on the fact that we’re so familiar with the technology that Sadako is using to take her revenge 1 that they’ve become a mundane commonplace of almost every home. The rest of the technology and the accompanying science is pretty nonsensical but by rooting the essentials in the real world, Nakata and screenwriter Takahashi Hiroshi are given free reign to introduce the increasingly wild and improbable supernatural elements.

Ringu 2 was once again a huge hit when it was released in Japan on 23 January 1999 as part of a double bill with Shunichi Nagasaki’s Shikoku and led a third film, Ringu 0: Bâsudei (2000), based on a short story by Ringu creator Koji Suzuki. It was less well received than the first two films and the franchise went on hold until Sadako returned in 2012 in the first of two 3D films inspired by Suzuki’s novel S and, confusingly, positioned as sequels to the other Ringu follow-up Rasen.

  1. Or we were – videotapes are now a very distant memory for many and there’s a generation growing up who have likely never seen one. ↩