The Ring Virus 1999

Sun-Joo, Shin Eun-kyung, a determined journalist and aunt to Sang-Mi, discovers that Sang-Mi and three friends all died on the same night after spending the night at a hotel resort. Her careful digging reveals a web of connections that ties the four teens to a single night away from home, setting off a tense investigation into what really happened and what secret the resort might be hiding.

A cryptic pager message and a note left in the resort’s guestbook push Sun-Joo further down the rabbit hole, until she encounters an unmarked videotape. The footage unfolds as a strange, disjointed collage of images—an ominous tidal wave, an old woman speaking in a thick dialect, and a stark shot of an old well—ending with a chilling message: anyone who watches the tape will die one week later. The remainder of the tape has been overwritten, leaving only these haunting fragments. The moment Sun-Joo finishes the recording, she receives a phone call that carries the same music-box-like tune heard on the tape, amplifying her sense that the mystery is personal and deadly.

To parse the tape’s origin and the so‑called cure for the death curse, Sun-Joo enlists the help of the pathologist who performed the autopsies, Jung Jin-young as Choi Yeol. They copy the tape and begin tracing its source, growing convinced that the visions weren’t created by a camera but by a human mind with psychic powers. Their research points toward a historical figure named Eun-Suh, a gifted psychic whose life story appears to be the key to understanding the deadly enigma. Sun-Joo’s own daughter Boram also watches the tape, intensifying her mother’s drive to solve the riddle before the curse claims another victim.

The trail leads to Eun-Suh’s island home, where Sun-Joo and Choi-Yeol learn that Eun-Suh made a name for herself by predicting a tidal wave. Eun-Suh’s mother Jung-Sook—a renowned psychic in her own right—died by suicide after a failed demonstration. They uncover a troubling note from Eun-Suh’s past: while working as a club singer, she was spied on in the shower by a co-worker, who was later found dead. As a violent storm closes in, the investigators find Eun-Suh’s house, marked by a striking painting of her by her cousin Oh Kyung-Pil.

Kyung-Pil is confronted, and he reveals a painful history: he was once in a sanatorium, and Eun-Suh came to look after him. One fateful night, Kyung-Pil raped Eun-Suh by an old well, and in the moment of panic he learned that Eun-Suh was intersex. Terrified, he strangled her and dumped her body into the very well Sun-Joo and Choi-Yeol later uncover. Realizing the sanatorium site sits on the land that now hosts the resort, the duo return there to search for answers. In the crawlspace beneath a balcony, they locate the old well and begin to lower it with buckets as Sun-Joo’s one-week deadline approaches. Sun-Joo eventually discovers Eun-Suh’s skeleton, and for a moment it seems the curse has been broken as the deadline passes.

Yet the true horror reveals itself as Choi-Yeol’s deadline nears. His television turns on by itself, showing the well at the end of the tape, and the spectre of Eun-Suh crawls from the screen to kill him. Sun-Joo is horrified to realize the curse isn’t broken at all — it operates like a virus, spreading when the videotape is copied and shown to others. The chilling implication is clear: the only way to halt the cycle is to pass the tape along, replicating it as it travels. With this grim understanding, Sun-Joo drives to her parents’ house to show them the tape in a desperate bid to save Boram, hoping that sharing the terrifying truth will finally turn the tide against the spectral chain of deaths.

• The mystery deepens, the danger remains relentless, and the idea of a haunting that travels through a film becomes a life‑or‑death reality for everyone touched by the tape.