On the broadest level of the narrative, too, "The Ring's" false ending goes a long way toward disabling the viewer's defenses. After all Rachel's scrupulous clue collecting and her ultimate discovery of the circumstances of Samara's death, the violins kick in to consecrate the demon's eternal rest and the Keller family's renewal. But Samara remains implacable, right on time for her date with Noah. We can only conclude that Samara's murder fails to explain the genesis of the tape, or even its particular images: These are only inexplicably correlative manifestations of, as Katie eloquently puts it, "something else." What is "the Ring"? Is it the sun-rimmed lid of the well? An oval mirror? A circle on a pad of paper? The dread eye of Samara herself? This expansiveness leaves us feeling overexposed. Yes, the onslaught is survivable, we think in the film's last scene, as Rachel directs Aidan's fingers toward the copy buttons. But what do they survive to? The same kind of persecution that drove Richard Morgan into his bathtub with a power cord around his neck, or that landed Rebecca Kotler in the asylum? We can't be sure, but we suspect the worst.

The Bottom of the Well

Since none of the plot, strictly speaking, really matters in "The Ring" -- it's all veneer, all surface, all narrative sleight of hand -- we are sometimes subjected to teasing incongruities. These are more like rabbit holes than holes in the plot. At the instant of the false resolution's disintegration, when Aidan learns that his mom has liberated Samara's remains, he gasps, "You helped her? You weren't supposed to help her!" This suggests that Rachel has transgressed some universal law, has somehow made things immeasurably worse.

In fact it doesn't make any difference whether Rachel "helped" Samara or not. Earlier in the film, when Rachel breaks in on Aidan's viewing of the tape, we see at the tail end of the video footage that Samara is already emerging from the well; there the tape breaks off, interrupting Samara in midshamble, her forward advance presumably to be completed in seven days' time. Samara's bones may be imprisoned, but her posthumous self already travels freely. If there's any good news for the Kellers, it's that things can't get any worse. Still, Aidan's misdirection shouldn't be taken lightly; just as Rachel's search is her attempt to explain and thereby resolve Samara's reign of terror, this is Aidan's own stab at comprehending what he's up against. And he's equally misguided.

In fact, this snippet of dialogue effectively transports us to a still deeper level of "The Ring," leading us toward its chilly postmodern core. Throughout the film, just as the virtual images of the tape migrate into actual experience, the dialogue is regularly implicated in the same pattern. In one minor instance, when Noah takes his leave at the film's false bottom, he tells Rachel, "Call me tomorrow. And the day after that." She does, but not to discuss china patterns; rather, she dials frantically to warn Noah of his imminent demise.

All films are inherently multilingual, communicating on several levels: imagistic, supratextual (narrative), and textual (dialogue), to name the primaries. "The Ring" consciously operates on, and ultimately destabilizes, all of them. The thrust of this three-pronged attack is particularly evident in one of the film's most jarring moments. While Rachel and Ruth, Katie's mother, discuss the inconceivable circumstances of Katie's death, Ruth says, "I saw her face," and instantly we are subjected to the shot of the closet-bound corpse, in a state of truly hideous decrepitude. Just as Noah's naive "Call me" engenders a call, Ruth's phrase engenders a face. In both cases, the words exert a reality-collapsing force like that of the cursed video images; they literally shape what happens, or at least what we see. Here, the words call forth an image meant to frighten us to death; they are the delivery system of terror, the envelope, or, if you will, the videotape: Samara's calling card. Language is her tool too.

For those who had the pleasure of studying linguistic deconstruction, it should be clear that here "The Ring" is tapping in to some ex-cutting-edge philosophy, particularly those French pooh-bahs who warn us to be suspicious of language, suggesting it's more our foe than our friend. Suffice it to say that "The Ring" offers a postmodern paradox in its treatment of language. The best and perhaps most resonant illustration involves Samara's seven-day dispensation. When she hisses, "Seven days," into Rachel's phone, she makes possible this particular film, with its measure of false hope. The dictate is both creative and destructive in the same breath; like God, she calls a narrowly circumscribed universe into existence, but one in which everyone is doomed.

"The Ring" takes the implications of such thinking to a final unsettling level. In the film's first scene, Katie confesses that she has seen the accursed tape. With the utmost gravity, she tells the story of watching the video with her chums, then segues into a passing imitation of the death agony -- before breaking into laughter at the expense of her mortified friend. She's lying, kidding around, play-acting. But insofar as this film's dialogue carries the force of fate, we must consider the possibility (and I have to say this now, before a sequel renders the thought obsolete) that Katie never visited Shelter Mountain and never saw the tape until she says she did. Does the tape even exist before Rebecca proffers her hushed incantation of the urban legend? In these moments, we find ourselves trapped with the characters in a disturbing cycle where the fictional has a way of proving true, despite our denials, prevarications or evasions. Apply this nicety to your experience of watching the film itself, and you might acquire an unhealthy distrust of casual conversation, as well as your TV set.

Here's the tricky part. If what the characters say has the ability to shape reality, then why all the missed swings at the piñata? Why does Rachel's laborious account or Aidan's moral outburst or, for that matter, Noah's initial skepticism fail to save any of them? Consider that none of the characters is precisely wrong. Aidan says, "You helped her?" and strikes upon the double entendre that Rachel has indeed helped Samara, by making a copy of the tape. When informed of the rash of teen deaths, Noah tries to allay Rachel's obsession with the tape, insisting the fatalities are "not because of a video." Yes and no; it's not the tape exactly that's to blame, but rather the waterlogged damsel it allows to enter your world (and to change it). Finally, we should remember that Samara, as Aidan learns to appreciate, is the black sun irradiating this film's tortured atmosphere. In that light it's hard to hope for anything like salvation.

None of this is meant to detract from the sheer visual potency of the film, its high-tech scares, the ancient magnetism of its archetypal imagery or even its broader compositional ability to defamiliarize the mundane world, to knock our perception off-kilter. Instead, what the foregoing attempts to illustrate are the myriad nuances that elevate "The Ring" to a rarefied cultural status and, collectively, might begin to explain its withering effect. Maybe what's most surprising is that Samara herself remains a figure adequate to the full scope of this film's horror. Yeah, she's pint-size and retiring. But she can carry whatever it is she's dragging out of that well.

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