This Is My Ring Piece, Show Me Yours

And so when somebody offered me the chance to take a free sneak peek at Naomi Watts' Ring did you really expect me to say no? Though unlike Robyn I got mine not through a celebrity date but via a cleaner at my local UCI. Parallax View is *so* not London, it really hurts sometimes.

Anyway, Ring. Based on the Japanese hit movie of the same name. Changed quite a bit and directed by a guy (the rather implausibly monikored Gore Verbinski) who has clearly watched a few movies by Kubrick, Cronenberg, Lynch et al.

Naomi Watts plays an investigative journalist who's so feisty that when her editor tells her she's fired she says 'No, I'm not!' and he just accepts it, without question, just like that (try that one next time yer gaffer catches you reading PV in office time).

When her teenage niece's heart suddenly stops seven days after watching a notorious videotape, she is drawn into investigating the source of this latterday 'urban legend'. As she learns to take the mortal dread of the videotape deadly seriously, she finds herself in a race against time to unravel the mystery and save her own life in a battle to beat the biggest deadline of all.

Viewers expecting a jumpy, shlocky gorefest are likely to be disappointed as what we have here is a movie that contents itself with steadily ratcheting up the creepiness factor in a way that stays much longer with you than we have come to expect from recent Hollywood horror fare. There are a handful of scenes that I would have scripted, filmed or edited differently but by and large it's a pretty effective piece of film-making. What helps make it work so well is that the central mystery is satisfyingly resolved, a cutesy ending narrowly avoided for something more relevant and subversive.

So Parallax View gives Ring three gently lubricated fingers out of a possible fistful of four.