Fantasia Fest runs from July 11th to August 1st, 2019. For more information, click here.
Sadako, which opened Fantasia Fest 2019, is the return of director Hideo Nakata to the series, who helmed the original Ringu over 20 years ago. The film acts a reboot/sequel of sorts with a script by Sadako 3D: 2 scribe Noriaki Sugihara, who abandons the campier tone in which the series had begun to traffic to try to get it back to its eerier roots. After mainlining that Arrow Blu-ray set a few months ago, I was more than ready to check this new entry out after hearing that it would not only be opening Fantasia, but that Nakata would be making this his return to the franchise. Nakata had the rare distinction of not only making a film that ignited the J-horror boom of the 2000s, but also then directing the sequel to the US remake of his own film, which was unheard of at the time.
Sadako takes place in the present and begins with a little girl (Himeka Himejima) who is locked in a closet, about to burned alive by her mother, claiming she is the reincarnation of Sadako. A month later the girl is found wandering the streets and is taken to a mental institution where she meets the young and naive psychiatric counselor Dr. Akikawa (Elaiza Ikeda). When police show up to question the girl we find there is no birth record for her, and the only way they were able to tie her to her mother, who died in that apartment building fire that she mysteriously escaped in the beginning, was DNA. When Dr. Akikawa’s brother, a struggling YouTuber, just so happens to break into the very same abandoned apartment hopefully to make make his next viral video, the young man abruptly disappears. This sends Mayu Akikawa down the very familiar rabbit hole fans of these films have come to expect, albeit with a few surprises thrown in for good measure along the way.
Having just revisited the original three films, Sadako definitely matches the template set for the original trilogy. Hideo Nakata does try to delve a bit deeper into the mythology to show how Sadako got her power in the first place, which was an interesting hook. He also tries to do something a bit different with Sadako’s curse and how it affects people in the real world since there is no cursed video in this entry. This makes sense given this plot device has been exhausted by both the Japanese and American sequels. Like most of my issues of with the film, this aspect feels a bit clumsy with how it’s executed, like some of the best questions this film proposes to the audience. Nakata is content giving answers for questions we don’t really care about, while the interesting questions the film proposes just fall to the wayside.
Sadako shows promise and is a return to form for the series, but it ultimately falls short of what you would expect given over 20 years has passed since the director tackled a Ring film. There was a lot of potential here that is just kind of squandered after the first act, as Sadako goes on autopilot in its second and third acts, just retreading what fans expect from the series. I will say there is one really great moment that resolves a question I had from the original film, but once again why is Nakata answering that question when there is such fertile ground in the Himeka Himejima’s character arc and story? I will say in comparison to other films in the series, this is definitely one of the stronger entries and doesn’t feel too tedious. But I doubt most critics haven’t bothered to sit through Ring 3D 1 or 2 to truly appreciate this step up.