- Director: Gore Verbinski
- Writers: Ehren Kruger, Kôji Suzuki, Hiroshi Takahashi
- Stars: Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, Brian Cox
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 55 Minutes
Synopsis
A couple of girls watch TV late at night. Becca tells Katie about this videotape with a woman who sees you through the screen. As soon as it’s over, someone calls on the phone and says, “You will die in seven days.” Katie gets freaked out; she saw that exact thing just last week. Katie suddenly starts to gag; it’s all just a joke. Becca goes somewhere, and then the TV switches on. Katie gos upstairs and finds water running out of the bedroom; did something flood? She opens the door and sees a well on the TV screen in there; she screams.
Rachel picks up Aiden at school, and his teacher mentions Aiden’s cousin’s recent death. He keeps drawing his dead cousin with crayons. Katie died three nights ago, but Aiden drew the pictures last week. Apparently, Katie told Aiden that she knew she didn’t have much time and was going to die.
After the funeral, Katie’s mother explains that Katie’s heart simply stopped, and the doctors can’t explain why. Rachel talks to a couple of kids outside and learns that Katie’s boyfriend supposedly committed suicide the same night that Katie died, but his friends all think it had something to do with watching the tape. Rachel finds a ticket for unprocessed film in Katies room and gets it developed. All the photos of her and her friends taken after she watched the tape are distorted. There were actually four deaths that night, of all Katie’s friends who went to that cabin.
Rachel goes to the cabin and talks to the innkeeper, who has a lending library of videotapes. She rents the cabin and plays the tape. There’s an image of a ring, flowing water, a chair, a woman combing her hair, a man in a window, a fly, maggots, a giant worm, and other strange things. There’s a woman who jumps off a cliff, and then it ends with the image of a well. The phone rings.
Rachel calls her friend Noah over to take her picture; it’s blurry. He wants to see the tape. He watches the tape and doesn’t believe any of it. Still, the numbers on the video display make no sense; there’s something wrong with the control track on the VHS machine. Rachel starts seeing things from the tape in normal life, such as the long ladder.
Rachel does more research and finds a lighthouse “hidden” in the footage. She tracks it down to an island and finds the woman in the video in a historical photo of the lighthouse. She is Anna Morgan. Anna raised horses, and there was an incident where a bunch of the horses died under mysterious circumstances. She may have jumped off a cliff.
Noah goes to the store and notices his face is distorted in the security camera video. That night, Rachel pukes up a braided string of wire with an electrode on the end. It’s just a dream, but she has a mark on her arm when she wakes up. She finds that Aiden has watched the tape.
Rachel goes to the island where Anna Morgan lived, while Noah does research at the mental hospital where Anna stayed for a while. On the ferry to the island, a horse goes crazy and jumps overboard. She meets Mr. Morgan, who gave up horses completely after the disaster. She asks him about the tape, and he asks her to leave. She mentions his daughter, and he gets positively mean. Noah finds records that there was a daughter named Samara.
The Morgan’s doctor talks to Rachel, and she explains that Samara somehow caused Anna to get weird visions. The doctor recommended a psychiatric hospital on the mainland. “Ever since that girl’s been gone, things have been better.”
Rachel goes back to the Morgan ranch that evening and finds a videotape of Samara in the mental hospital. Samara thinks her daddy wants her to go away. Morgan goes into the bathroom, which is flooded with water, and electrocutes himself excessively. Noah arrives, and the two of them find Samara’s “prison” in the barn.
They both got back to the cabin where it all started, and Rachel explains that her time is nearly up. They spill marbles onto the floor, and they all roll into a puddle in one section. The two of them tear up the floor and find a well beneath it. An unfortunate series of events happens, and Rachel ends up falling into the nearly bottomless well.
Samara’s hand coms up out of the water, giving Rachel a vision of everything that happened. Anna was the one who killed Samara, not Mr. Morgan. The last thing she saw was the stone being pushed over the top of the well, creating a “ring” of light that was part of the videotape. Noah comes back and explains that it’s past sunset, so Rachel’s one week is over and past; she’s probably safe now.
The next morning, Aiden asks about the girl. Rachel explains that they set her free. Aiden looks shocked, “You helped her?” Aiden explains that Rachel shouldn’t have done that. “She never sleeps,” he adds.
Noah is working late when his TV switches on. He sees the well and watches Samara crawl up out of the well and advance toward the camera. He watches in shock as she crawls out of the TV and kills him. Rachel throws a tantrum and burns her copy of the tape. Wait— she made a copy! Maybe the secret to freedom is passing on the curse to someone else with a copy of the video? She shows Aiden how to make a copy. “It’s going to keep going, isn’t it? It’ll never stop,” Aiden asks. “What happens to the person we show it to? What happens to them?”
Commentary
The entire film is tinted in sickly green, something I hadn’t really noticed on previous viewings. It’s really annoying once you notice it. It’s not exactly a shot-for-shot remake, most scenes early in the film match up between this and the original at least a little, but it diverges quite a lot later on. The stuff with the horses was new. Rachel visiting the ranch where various settings from the tape could be found was also new.
The crawling out of the TV scene was much better done here. Samara keeps the “flickery TV effect” even once she got out of the TV, which was a really nice effect.
Overall the production values are much higher in this remake, and the story is much more explained, although there are still many unanswered questions. I’m sure these will all be resolved in the various sequels…