The Ring Virus
The Ring Virus is … a movie. It’s a pretty alright movie, I guess, or at least I don’t regret watching it. That said, unless you've got Ringverse brainworms (AKA ringworm), you may not agree.
The acting was pretty good! There wasn’t a memorable point at which I went “uh… normal people don’t act/talk like that.” It was engaging in that way, and since I’m weirdly picky about line delivery and easy to shake from belief in the characters, it was a breath of fresh air. (That said, this movie took me a month-ish to watch for various reasons, so maybe I’ve just forgotten—but again, if there was any truly bad acting, it would have stuck out in my memory, I’m sure.) Our Sadako stand-in, Eun-Suh Park (played by Eun-kyung Shin), was particularly well-acted; she really drove home the exhaustion of a violent death, collapsing on the floor after crawling out of the television even more than Sadako does. It tricks you into underestimating her, considering she kills someone immediately after. Maybe it was all part of the plan...
There was a major mistake, however, in changing the Asakawa stand-in, Sun-Joo Hong, to a woman—or rather, in not making the Takayama stand-in, Choi-Yul, a bit more … well, normal, as Ringu did. While I wholeheartedly support a female protagonist, keeping the aforementioned deuteragonist’s characterization as a sex freak who’s keen in ways the protag isn’t while changing the protag’s gender basically has us watching a woman get told how to do her job by a pervy guy. This was one of the reasons I found it so hard to keep watching, although it does get less egregious as the film goes on.
The treatment of Eun-Suh by the narrative as an intersex woman was also odd, at least to me. Not as bad as in the books, of course, and keep in mind that I’m not an expert on intersexism, but what’s with the obsession with her genitals when it’s not relevant until Spiral? That’s not to say, of course, that I don’t like it when adaptations differ from their source material—in fact, I think it’s necessary to make the adaptation worthwhile—it just came off as such a weird thing to emphasize. Again, though, take this with a grain of salt, since I’m not intersex myself.
(Insert a little complaint about the deeply underwhelming visual effects—it was clearly made on a shoestring budget, so I don’t want to rag on it too hard, but ehhhh.)
All in all … I didn’t hate it. It didn’t make me angry for autism reasons the way e.g. Rings did, and I don’t regret watching it despite the weirdness. That said, I think it’s really only a worthwhile watch if you’re autistic about the Ringverse like me, especially since the Korean ban of Japanese imports that spawned The Ring Virus was overturned by the time it came out, so it didn’t even end up being a necessary bootleg. I guess I hope the actors had fun?
Final rating: ★★⯨☆☆
Back to reviews