The Ring

Gore Verbinski’s film follows Rachel, a journalist chasing a tape said to kill whoever watches it seven days later. DreamWorks paid a million dollars for the American remake rights to Hideo Nakata’s Ringu, and shooting started before the screenplay was finished, with Verbinski working from a visual notebook made in advance. That is why the picture trusts images before explanation. Bojan Bazelli produced the cold green grey in camera with filtration rather than in a digital grade and killed shadows with layered diffusion, so the chill is on the negative rather than a layer added afterwards. The sets took their muted palette from Andrew Wyeth and hid circles in carpet, wallpaper and doorknobs. The maple tree was fake, steel tubing and plaster with painted silk leaves; the crew called it Lucille and the wind kept knocking it over. The scene where Naomi Watts pulls out a hairball was not in the script; Verbinski described it to her weeks before filming. Chris Cooper shot a strand as a child murderer that bookended the film, dropped after previews. A good fit if you want to read the colour and the circles as decisions on a second pass. Not for anyone who needs evil attached to a person, because once Cooper went, the strand that framed it with human evil went too.