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I saw The Ring last week at an advance sreening. Who are these screenings meant for? Movie reviewers of small-town papers? Or the kind of movie-goer that just has to see a movie on its very first day and can provide "word of mouth" about it? Maybe the latter, and I had meant to offer such advance word: if you're looking for a honest-to-life horror movie, don't set your hopes on this one. But I found myself "writerly" bankrupt and couldn't write about it. Instead, I've waited for the reviews to come 7 days later and have proceeded to crib from them. So, for the sake of honesty, all the below opinions belong to Andrew O'Hehir, Cynthia Fuchs, Roger Ebert and Elvis Mitchell. The mix-n-match is mine; think of it as "collage."

Based on Hideo Nakate's 1998 cult favorite, Ringu, in turn based on Kôji Suzuki's novel, The Ring is there to be admired instead of to creep you out. Enormous craft has been put into the movie, but while impressively made, this impassive and cold feature fails, in a spectacular fashion, to deliver the thrills. Its mechanical assembly simply emphasizes how devoid of feeling the film is.

There's this weird videotape, see, one you can't find at Blockbuster. You watch it, you get a creepy phone call, and seven days later you die. At the beginning of The Ring, Becca (Rachael Bella) shares such a story with her friend Katie (Amber Tamblyn). Katie's eyes go wide. She and her boyfriend saw that tape last weekend, exactly a week ago. Scant minutes later, after some scary shenanigans concerning a TV that keeps turning itself on, Katie's dead. The same idea was ripped off in August by feardotcom, also a bad movie. Still, this scene isn't played for laughs the way most horror-movie killings are these days.

Rachel (Naomi Watts), a hard-boiled, skeptical journalist who is the dead girl's aunt, begins to investigate the killer tape. She takes the tape to her estranged husband Noah (hunky if forgettable Martin Henderson), a video geek who doesn't get the danger and dismisses her fears. (The rupture in their relationship is never explained.) Their son Aidan (David Dorfman) is one of those spookily precocious kids who have become ubiquitous in the post-Sixth Sense horror universe; David Dorfman seems to have studied at the Haley Joel Osment School of Fine Acting. Based on the dark circles under Aidan's eyes and his solemn, old-man's enunciation, he's got problems of his own.

Rachel watches the freakout videotape, an almost indescribable non-narrative montage in grainy black-and-white — a woman in a mirror, a man at a window, a ladder against a wall, a centipede crawling from beneath a table and "the ring," a circle of light resembling the corona of a solar eclipse. As Noah comments after watching the tape (against Rachel's wishes), it's "very film-student."

For all its seeming arbitrariness, the videotape, in the end, leads Rachel on a quest. Much of what follows consists of close-ups of the clues that Rachel sifts through to solve the mystery, along with Noah and Aidan. The video does indeed bring death in a week, something we are reminded of as Rachel tries to solve the case while titles tick off the days.

There is a moment when we think The Ring is going to end, and it doesn't: that old reliable where the heroine, soaking wet and saved from death, says "I want to go home," and the hero cushions her head on his shoulder. But no, there's more. Its resolution, such as it is, raises dreadful questions about maternal devotion and protectiveness and the extremes to which you might go in order to preserve your own child's welfare before anyone else's.

The Ring incorporates the language of film surrealism. As it progresses, the boundaries between the film's "real" world and the videotape's world give way: The mirror and window appear in a real house (on a distant island) and the ladder appears against a wall outside Noah's loft. A fly that appears on the tape can actually be plucked from the TV screen and set free.

The viewer versed in horror will likely forgive the film's lack of explanation for its bizarre phenomena, including cryptic dialogue and non-closure. Who created the diabolical videotape in The Ring, and what do they want? Well, just as in all the truly memorable horror movies, the dark forces don't want understanding or love or a Christian burial — they just want to terrify and destroy us. The power of evil cannot be contained by love or death or technology or any other force.