A young woman finds herself on the receiving end of a terrifying curse that threatens to take her life in 7 days.

So I just saw Rings. I think. It’s been 2 hours and my brain has already begun the process of reallocating that memory for more useful things like memorizing the Nickelback discography. Let’s start from the top, lest this hour and 42 minutes of my life be discarded without any record. The film starts out with the plane scene from the trailer and it’s as over-the-top as it initially appeared and feels like the beginning of a Final Destination film. Sadly it’s not, those movies are fun. So that guy dies and we’re introduced to Gabriel, (Johnny Galecki) a university biology professor that seems to spend his time spouting metaphysical drivel in the hopes of getting one of his students to sleep with him. He meets Skye, (Aimee Teegarden) one of his students, while perusing a yard sale of the dead man’s stuff when an old VCR catches his eye, leading him to lecture her on the significance of VHS technology. In the following scene it’s implied the two are now a couple (presumably she was wooed by his knowledge of obsolete video formats) and together they open the VCR, discovering a tape labeled “Watch Me”. Hoping to check out some good old fashioned amateur pornography, they plug it in and their fates are sealed.

Cut to our main protagonists, Julia (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) and Holt (Alex Roe). They’re a couple; we’re told they love each other. Holt is a bro that looks like a cross between Zac Efron and a poor man’s Hemsworth, but not as cut, hence why he’s forced to star in Rings. Julia is the girlfriend character, that’s her main defining trait, she’s also our primary protagonist, so things are starting out promising. Holt is going off to college, but Julia has to stay behind to help her mother, or maybe it was orphans, I don’t really remember. We’re told she’s a good person.  Alas, even the fiery romance of these two recently-animated mannequins trying to understand love can’t bear the burden of their separation and they begin to grow apart. Or do they? Julia decides to track him down after not returning her calls and receives a distressing Skype call from Skye, her face distorting into grotesque forms, claiming Holt is a dead man. Understandably alarmed, though her performance only exhibits mild annoyance, she goes to track him down. What she finds is some sort of underground video watching club/bar where people go to watch the Ring video, because that’s what college kids do for fun, watch VHS tapes. 

By most metrics Rings is a competently made film. There are some great claustrophobic shots and the effects work is surprisingly restrained. There are even a few sequences that are genuinely intense and foreboding sprinkled throughout the cheap jump scares. The supporting cast has a few gems, with Vincent D’Onofrio giving it his all as the blind cemetery owner with mysterious motives and Teegarden at the very least tries, even if the results are mixed.  Roe’s performance isn’t that distracting, that’s the best thing I can say about it. He plays a role that could’ve been played by a thousand other actors with enough competence that I could occasionally believe he actually exists in this world. Lutz’s performance on the other hand exists at the intersection of ineptitude and disinterest. Galecki has some defining traits, namely spewing off smart-sounding nonsense about ancient civilizations and quantum mechanics, some of which is shoehorned into Rings‘ breathless and frenzied climax, but otherwise treats the fear of imminent death with the same indifference as everyone else. The climax is where this film really starts to pick up, advancing the series’ canon and featuring scenes that are actually engaging, largely thanks to D’Onofrio. Unfortunately, by that point the film is playing catch up to make up for lost time and the ship has sailed on getting the audience invested in the characters. I guess I should also talk about Samara. (Bonnie Morgan) She’s in the movie. She doesn’t get a lot of screen time, which makes sense given they don’t want to show too much of their monster, but when she is on screen, her contortionist abilities combined with some solid effects work give her a great unnatural aesthetic. If you were wondering how they made an actress in her mid-thirties look like a child, however, they didn’t. Apparently Samara has grown up a bit hanging out in the well all these years.

Rings is boring. There are elements here and there that work on their own, but the heart of a story is the characters, and here the film fumbles in both design and execution. It’s almost as if the actors knew their characters had no substance and felt this gave them a free pass to not try. I’m sure there will be worse horror movies coming out this year—I’ll probably end up reviewing some of them—but while it could be a more catastrophic failure than it ended up being, it still gets my vote for most cynical cash grab of 2017 so far.