The Ring Thing

This is one of those movies I’m going to give a negative review of but I’m going to feel bad about it. The Ring Thing a small budget queer movie that was made by queer people. It means well. Sadly, it just isn’t good.

The movie opens with a miscommunication between Sarah and her partner Kristen. Sarah shows Kristen a ring she found at her mother’s house and Kristen believes this is a proposal. This misunderstanding brings focus to the issue of commitment in Sarah and Kristen’s relationship. Kristen wants to marry Sarah but Sarah finds the concept of marriage scary. To work through her feelings on commitment and marriage, Sarah begins a documentary with her divorced, gay friend Gary on same-sex couples and commitment. During this time, Sarah and Kristen experience the various trials and tribulations that come with being a long-term couple with different views of what their future will look like.

The best parts of this movie are the documentary segments. These bits seem to be real people giving real opinions as opposed to actors reading scripted dialogue. That difference is palpable. Whereas the scripted dialogue feels stilted and disconnected, the documentary scenes are refreshingly natural. I was continuously much more interested in these real-world people than the fictitious people that the movie focused on. Frankly, I wish this movie was just a documentary on same-sex couples and commitment. It’s not a good sign that I want The Ring Thing to be a different genre of film all together.

It seems a focus of the film is normalizing queer relationships. Queer couples aren’t weird, they have standard and boring life and relationship drama just like everyone else! The problem is The Ring Thing fails in making its characters interesting. Yes, the conflicts that they encountered felt true to life but if I wanted to experience everyday people and conflicts, I’d go interact with real people. I needed to care about these characters in order for me to care about their mundane struggles. And I don’t. These characters are flat, uninteresting and their problems are standard. In trying to normalize characters and make the movie true to life, they’ve gone too far and made the movie dull. These aren’t characters I’d care to talk to for an hour and 45 minutes so why would I want to watch a movie about them?

The Ring Thing has pacing problems. Scenes of dialogue are constantly too long. The amount of information in most given dialogue scenes could be done in half the amount of lines. Instead, scenes take too long to build up and keep going past when they should end. The same is true with major plot points. These too could be reached significantly faster had the film had more focus and sense of urgency. Instead, lots of scenes in The Ring Thing feel like filler. The movie clocks in at an hour and 45 minutes. I’ve always been of the belief that especially if your movie has a smaller budget, you should keep the run time to around 90 minutes. That’s perfect movie length. The Ring Thing could probably go even shorter. There’s definitely more than 15 minutes that could be cut from this movie.

Ironically, despite the fact that Gary, one of the major characters in the film is a film editor, the film editing in The Ring Thing is really poor. I don’t know how much of this is the editor’s fault and how much is that they didn’t have enough material to work with. Either way, cuts between scenes and shots can feel abrupt while on the flip sides, there’s a tendency for scenes, especially dialogue scenes to have only one, boring static shot. In addition, more than once there were dialogue scenes where this unmoving camera angle was looking at one character nearly face-on while the other character was mostly just seen from the back of their head. I’d give this a pass if it happened once. Maybe the coverage from other angles just wasn’t up to scratch for this specific scene. It happens more than once.

The worst example is an argument between Sarah and Kristen. For the length of this key scene, the camera only focuses on Sarah’s face while we see the back of Kristen’s head. At least half the scene’s emotion is missing because we cannot see Kristen’s face. I can understand that time was at a premium and The Ring Thing probably had a pretty short shooting schedule. However, this is a low-budget, character-based film. Dialogue scenes are this movie’s bread and butter. That’s what the priority needs to be. I can’t understand The Ring Thing’s apparent allergy to the standard shot-reverse-shot technique of shooting dialogue. At the very least, if they could only film dialogue from one angle, film at an angle so both characters are seen in profile.

I’ve been really harsh on The Ring Thing and again, I do feel bad. I want small, queer films to succeed. I want them to be good. But this one just isn’t. The screenplay has pacing issues and boring characters. The directing compounds those problems. The final product is an uninteresting narrative feature that made me wish I was watching a documentary or interacting with actual people or doing anything else other than watching The Ring Thing.

Overall rating: 2.7/10

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