A young reporter investigates a mysterious superstition about a deadly videotape. In the home of whoever watches it, first a strange phone call is heard, and later the person dies. After her niece dies the same way, the woman decides to investigate and watches the ill-fated tape herself. A little later, a phone call rings in her apartment. Now the journalist has only seven days to get to the bottom of the origins of the terrible curse.

4k movies reviews
The subject of curses has been mumbled by cinema, literature, and simple campfire gossip culture down to the skeleton. And there is an opinion that it is fashionable to keep salivating over the skeleton of a mumbled topic without creating anything new, but it is possible to build up the meat on it yourself. Give it new life. To bring originality where it seems there is no chance for it anymore. Is this what Hideo Nakata did with his Ringing? Hardly.

However, without introducing novelty, Nakata, now an acclaimed master of horror and then a talented unknown creator of fear, scared his countrymen and half of Europe and America so much that he earned the attention of a certain Spielberg, whom some say is even ready to enroll in the Gods of cinema. The call is indeed primitive, the concept expressed in a simple scheme: object-damnation-timeline. The outcome of the deadline for the secondary characters is naturally death, for the main characters … see for yourself.

The object in Zvonka is a cassette tape with a surrealistically rough recording, which appeared in a very curious way: after trying to record a nightly TV broadcast from a channel not working at night. The Curse in the Call is a ghost avenging itself and, as is customary, wanting something very much from the living.

Psychologically, the film is intelligently, even strategically constructed–you are frightened the most when you think it’s over. Screen time is a build-up and fake relaxation, filmed just for the sake of being a prequel to the final scene.

The “music” deserves special compliments – it’s the scraping of a fork on rusty metal that will remain in the memory of impressionable viewers for a long time to come.

Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (72.8 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Audio
German: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
German: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
Japanese: DTS-HD Master Audio 6.1
Japanese: Dolby Digital 5.1
English: Dolby Digital 2.0

Subtitles
English, German.