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Critics have discussed Ring’s preoccupations with Japanese tradition’s collision with modernity. Colette Balmain identifies, “In the figure of Sadako, Ring [utilises the] vengeful yurei archetype of conventional Japanese horror” 174. She argues how this traditional Japanese figure is expressed via a videotape which “embodies contemporary anxieties, in that it is technology through which the repressed past reasserts itself” 170.

Ruth Goldberg argues that Ring “lends itself to a close reading of the ambivalence about motherhood” 371. She reads Reiko as a mother who – due to a new potential for women’s independence – neglects her ‘natural’ role as martyred homemaker in pursuit of an independent identity. This leads to the neglect of her child 377. Goldberg identifies a ‘doubling effect’ whereby the unconscious conflicts of Reiko’s family are expressed via the supernatural in the other family of Reiko’s investigation 380.

Jay McRoy gives a hopeful reading of the ending, that if the characters can therapeutically understand their conflicts, they can live on 87. Balmain however, is not so optimistic. She identifies that survival relies on reassertion of patriarchy and reads the replication of the video as technology spreading, virus-like throughout Japan 175.