The Ring is a 2002 American supernatural psychological horror film directed by Gore Verbinski.
Plot[]
Teenage girls Katie and Becca discuss an urban legend about a cursed videotape that causes whoever views it to die in one week. That night, Katie, who viewed it one week ago with her friends, is killed by an unseen force.
At Katie's funeral, her mother asks her sister Rachel, a Seattle-based journalist, to investigate her daughter's death. Rachel discovers that Katie's friends all died in bizarre accidents at the same time as Katie's death. Rachel visits Shelter Mountain Inn, where Katie and her friends saw the tape. She finds and views the tape; it contains strange and frightening imagery. She then receives a phone call from an unknown caller who whispers, "Seven days". Though initially skeptical, Rachel quickly begins to experience supernatural occurrences linked to the tape.
Rachel recruits the help of her video analyst ex-husband Noah. He views the tape and Rachel makes him a copy. She identifies a woman on the tape: horse breeder Anna Morgan, who killed herself after some of her horses drowned themselves off Moesko Island. Rachel and Noah's 8-year-old son Aidan watches the tape. Aidan also possesses supernatural abilities, which he uses to help with Rachel's investigation.
Rachel heads for Moesko Island to speak to Anna's widower Richard; en route, a horse aboard the ferry kills itself by jumping overboard. Rachel discovers that Anna, after four consecutive miscarriages, had adopted a girl named Samara, who possessed the ability to psychically etch images onto objects and into people's minds, tormenting her parents and their horses. Meanwhile, Noah travels to Gale Psychiatric Hospital and finds a psychiatric file on Samara, which contains a missing video last seen by Richard.
Returning to the Morgan home, Rachel finds a fake birth certificate proving that Samara is not the biological child of Richard and Anna. She also discovers the missing video, where Samara apologizes for her actions but explains that "they won't stop". Richard insists that Samara is evil and electrocutes himself. Noah and Rachel find a loft in the barn, which the Morgans used to isolate Samara from themselves and the outside world. There is an image of a tree behind the wallpaper; Rachel recognizes it as a tree at the Shelter Mountain Inn.
They return to Shelter Mountain Inn, led to a well beneath the floorboards. Rachel falls inside and experiences a vision of Anna dumping Samara into the well, where she survived for one week. Samara's body surfaces from the water. After Rachel is rescued, they arrange a proper burial for Samara.
Back home, Aidan warns Rachel that it was a mistake to help Samara. Rachel realizes that Noah's week is up; Samara's ghost crawls out of his TV screen and kills him. Rachel realizes that Samara’s apology was actually a confession and that she was only spared since she made a copy of the cursed video and passed it to Noah, fulfilling Samara's goal of killing endlessly. She helps Aidan make a copy of the tape and refuses to answer his question on what would happen to the person that watches it.
Cast[]
- Naomi Watts as Rachel Keller
- Martin Henderson as Noah Clay
- David Dorfman as Aidan Keller
- Daveigh Chase as Samara Morgan
- Brian Cox as Richard Morgan
- Shannon Cochran as Anna Morgan
- Jane Alexander as Dr. Grasnik
- Lindsay Frost as Ruth Embry
- Amber Tamblyn as Katie Embry
- Rachael Bella as Becca Kotler