Film

Dreamworks Pictures

Dead, bath, and beyond: Watts

Details

The Ring Two
Directed by Hideo Nakata
DreamWorks, in release

Related Content

• Hedda Lettuce, Polanski, And I Rocked The Chelsea Clearview
  October 7, 2011
• Celebs Should Not Be Allowed To Have Children!
  September 21, 2011
• My Five Favorite Movie Actresses
  July 28, 2011
• Dream House
  September 28, 2011
• Carnage Erupts At The New York Film Festival
  October 3, 2011

More About

• The Ring
• Sissy Spacek
• Naomi Watts
• Hideo Nakata
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

Will the circle be unbroken? Let's hope not. This poorly conceived sequel to Gore Verbinski's The Ring ditches that film's scariest conceit—people die a week after watching . . . an avant-garde video!—for a watery possession plot. Fleeing the gnarliness unleashed in the first movie's Seattle for small-town life, Rachel (Naomi Watts) and her weird little son (David Dorfman) have to fend off bad plumbing, angry deer, and the unshowered ghost girl who keeps ruining his digital photos. Postpartum depression is invoked several times; if the name of the game is to be the unheimlich maneuvers of the mother-child bond, one wishes Hideo Nakata (director of the Japanese Ringu films) could have nudged the proceedings toward the Rosemary's Baby-Birth axis. (Indeed, there's a brief, wordless melody intended to evoke RB.) Sissy Spacek, as the would-be Andrea Yates now in the loony bin, is thankfully obscured by a long wig. The let's-travel-through-the-TV-screen sequence was better in Fat Albert. Next time we'll try call-waiting.