AllMovie

Following up on the wild success of Ring and Ring 2, Hideo Nakata takes a break from spine-chilling horror to direct his labyrinthine postmodern crime thriller based on a book by Shogo Utano. After wealthy businessman Takayuki Komiyama (Ken Mitsuichi) finishes lunch with his beautiful wife Saori (played by pop star Miki Nakatani) at a tony Western restaurant, he discovers that she has disappeared while he was paying the bill. When he returns to his office, he gets a phone call informing him that she has been kidnapped, and demanding a huge ransom. With police detective Hamaguchi (Jun Kunimura) looking on, Komiyama sets out to a lonely highway to drop off the money, only Saori is not there. Cut to a flashback where the kidnapper named Kuroda (Masato Hagiwara) gets a call from Saori. Being in the profession of doing strange and shady things for all kinds of people, he agrees to fake Saori's kidnapping for a cool million yen. Saori apparently feels that her husband is looking elsewhere for affection, and wants to get out while the getting is good. Flash forward to Kuroda returning to his office with ransom money in hand, only to find the trussed up dead body on his floor. The phone rings and the anonymous caller tells Kuroda that he knows he killed Saori. But is Saori really dead?