Ring 0: Birthday is a 2000 Japanese prequel to Ring, directed by Norio Tsuruta, that follows Sadako Yamamura’s final weeks as a young woman.
At a glance
- Director: Norio Tsuruta
- Writer: Hiroshi Takahashi, from the short story “Lemon Heart” in Koji Suzuki’s collection Birthday
- Cast: Yukie Nakama, Seiichi Tanabe, Kumiko Asō, Yoshiko Tanaka, Daisuke Ban
- Release: January 22, 2000 (Japan)
- Runtime: 99 minutes
- Studio: Ring 0 Production Group, distributed by Toho
- Franchise: Ring franchise
Overview
By 2000 the Ring films had told audiences how Sadako killed. Ring 0 asks who she was before the well. Set thirty years before the cursed videotape, it recasts the monster as a nineteen-year-old drama student who wants to be ordinary and is not allowed to be. The result is the most melancholy entry in the Japanese series: a backstage tragedy with a ghost in the wings, and a film that makes the famous final image of Ringu feel like the end of a love story.
Plot summary
In the present day, a girl who has watched the tape confides that she dreams of Sadako’s murder. The story then jumps back three decades. Akiko Miyaji, a journalist whose fiancé died during the disastrous public demonstration of Shizuko Yamamura’s psychic powers, is hunting for Shizuko’s daughter.
She finds Sadako in Tokyo, working as an understudy in a small theater troupe. Sadako is shy and anxious, but her presence on stage unsettles everyone. When the lead actress, Aiko, is found dead after glimpsing a pale figure with long hair, Sadako inherits the role. Sound technician Hiroshi Toyama falls for her, to the dismay of costume designer Etsuko, who loves him. Director Shigemori grows obsessed. Members of the troupe start seeing a second girl in white who looks exactly like Sadako.
Sadako’s gift is not only destructive. She heals Toyama with a touch after Shigemori’s death and helps a disabled man walk. Miyaji’s photographs, however, show ghostly faces around her, and the journalist becomes convinced there are two Sadakos.
Spoiler section: the ending
On opening night, Etsuko plays recordings of Shizuko’s demonstration, and Sadako, overwhelmed by visions of her mother, lashes out. The troupe beats her to death, then follows the trail to Dr. Heihachiro Ikuma, who explains that Sadako split into two beings and that he has kept the malevolent half from growing. The two halves merge, and the revived Sadako kills the troupe one by one, Toyama included. Miyaji shoots Etsuko and herself rather than face her. In the final scene Ikuma drugs Sadako, strikes her with an axe and throws her down the well. She wakes from a dream of Toyama and screams as the stone lid slides shut.
Production and behind the scenes
Koji Suzuki published Birthday in 1999 as a set of short stories completing his Ring cycle. Hiroshi Takahashi, who scripted Ring and Ring 2, chose to adapt only “Lemon Heart” because the collection was too fragmented to film whole. Producer Takashige Ichise first offered the director’s chair to Hideo Nakata and the score to Kenji Kawai; both declined. Takahashi recommended Norio Tsuruta, his collaborator on the TV horror episode “Tatari” and a veteran of direct-to-video ghost stories. Tsuruta described Ring 0 as “a tragedy” about a young woman oppressed because she is different, in a society that pushes hard against straying from the norm.
Themes
The theater setting is the film’s sharpest idea. A troupe rehearsing a play is a small conformist society, and Sadako’s talent marks her as an outsider long before anyone sees her power. The mob violence of the climax echoes the jeering crowd at her mother’s demonstration, so the film’s real horror is how easily ordinary people turn on someone strange. Sadako Yamamura becomes the victim of the story before she is its villain.
Release and reception
Toho released the film on January 22, 2000. It was nominated at the 2001 Fantasporto festival, where Amores Perros took the top prize. Yukie Nakama’s restrained performance is usually singled out as the reason it works, and many fans now rank it as the best sequel in the Japanese line, even if it trades shocks for sadness.
Place in the franchise
Ring 0 sits at the start of the timeline but was the last of the original Toho-era trilogy. Its version of Sadako, a sympathetic young woman rather than a faceless spirit, influenced how later films treated her origins. The series went quiet for twelve years until Sadako 3D revived it in 2012.
Trivia
- The screenplay adapts only “Lemon Heart,” one of three stories in Suzuki’s Birthday collection.
- Hideo Nakata and composer Kenji Kawai both turned down the chance to return.
- Daisuke Ban plays Dr. Ikuma, the same character he played in Rasen two years earlier.
- Yukie Nakama was a rising television star and singer when she was cast as Sadako.
- Tsuruta and screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi had worked together on the 1999 TV episode “Tatari” before this film.
- The finale shows on screen the moment of Sadako’s murder that earlier films had only described.