Plot
Two teenagers, Masami (Hitomi Satō) and Tomoko (Yūko Takeuchi) talk about a videotape recorded by a boy in Izu which is fabled to bear a curse that kills the viewer seven days after watching. Tomoko then reveals that a week ago, she and three of her friends watched a weird tape and received a call after watching it. Unnervingly similar to the storied videotape, Masami realizes that Tomoko was fated to die. After some unsettling moments, Tomoko is killed by an unseen force with Masami having the horror of watching.
Some days later, Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima), a reporter investigating the popularity of the video curse among teenagers, discovers that her niece, Tomoko and her three other friends mysteriously died at the same time on the same night with their faces twisted in a rictus of fear. She also discovers that Masami, the girl who was with Tomoko when she died, became insane and is now in a mental hospital. After stumbling upon Tomoko's photos from the past week, Reiko finds out that the four teenagers stayed in a rental cabin in Izu. Eventually, she flips to a photo of the teens with their faces blurred and distorted.
Later, Reiko goes to Izu and finds an unlabeled tape in the reception room of the rental cottage where the teenagers stayed. Watching the tape inside Cabin B4, Reiko sees a series of seemingly unrelated disturbing images. As soon as the tape is over, Reiko sees a reflection in the television, and as she turns to see nobody behind her she receives a phone call, a realization of the tell-tale videotape curse. She now assumes that she has a week to live.
On the first day, Reiko enlists the help of her ex-husband, Ryūji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada). They take a picture of Reiko and find her face blurred in the photograph, further confirming that Reiko really was cursed. Ryūji then watches the tape, against Reiko's objections. A day later, Reiko creates a copy for Ryūji for them to study. They find a hidden message embedded within the tape saying that "if you keep on doing 'shōmon', the 'bōkon' will come for you." The message is in a form of dialect from Izu Ōshima Island. The two sail for Ōshima (after Reiko's son Yoichi watches the videotape) and discover the history of the great psychic Shizuko Yamamura, who was accused of faking supernatural powers. Yamamura committed suicide because of this and the power passed on to her daughter, which also caused her to be distrusted by the world and, ultimately, killed by her father.
With only a day left, Reiko and Ryūji discover that Shizuko's lost daughter, Sadako Yamamura, must have psionically made the videotape. The two go back to Izu with the assumption that Sadako is dead and it was her vengeful spirit that killed the teenagers. The duo then uncover a well under Cabin B4 and realize, through a vision, that Sadako's father killed her and threw her into the well. They try to empty the well and find Sadako's body in an attempt to appease her spirit. Reiko finds Sadako's body. When nothing happens to her, they believe that the curse is broken.
All seems fine until the next day when Ryūji is at his home and his TV switches on by itself showing the image of a well. He stares in horror as the ghost of Sadako crawls out of the well and out of Ryūji's TV set and frightens him into a state of shock, therefore killing him via cardiac arrest. Desperate to find a cure to save her son, Reiko realized that what she had done — and that Ryūji had not — saved her: copying the tape and showing it to Ryuji. With a VCR and Ryūji's copy of the tape, Reiko travels to see her son in attempt to save him, realizing that this is a never-ending cycle: The tape must always be copied and passed on to ensure the survival of the viewers.
Read more about this topic: Ring (film)
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“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
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And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)