The first scare in Nicolas Pesce’s The Grudge is so perfunctory you might hardly even notice it. There’s just a ghost in an alleyway, without so much as a “by your leave” or a “boo.” It looks as though these ghosts aren’t even trying anymore, which is a fitting way to describe this half-remake, half-reboot, all underwhelming movie.
Takeshi Shimizu’s Ju-On films have a complicated history, within the movies and without, to the extent that even tracking them all down and watching them in the right order can be somewhat complicated. Suffice it to say that they are the ever-branching story of a brutal murder, which left one house so horrifically haunted that everyone who steps inside takes a piece of it with them. It’s a ghost story by way of an epidemic, and the best entries in the series are equal parts human and hopeless.
Pesce’s new film, just titled The Grudge again, takes place in the same continuity as the previous American remakes. This time we follow an American woman from Tokyo to her home in Pennsylvania, where the haunting once again takes hold at her suburban house. Pesce’s film follows several timelines as a variety of characters come into contact with the cursed house and find their lives destroyed, like clockwork, by supernatural terrors.
Structurally, that’s not dissimilar to most of the other films in the series. Tonally, it’s a bit off. Whereas the characters who were previously “grudged” – a term Pesce’s film uses, or rather screams, to unintentionally comic effect – were often lively and interesting human beings, whose existence was unexpectedly tormented by grim specters of death, the new film is a downer from minute one and never changes moods. It’s as though each character’s life was pre-determined to be dreary, and adding ghosts into the mix is merely beating a dead horse.
Andrea Riseborough (Mandy) stars as Detective Muldoon, a widow raising a young boy on her own, whose investigation into a mysterious death leads her to the grudged house and into her own ghastly encounters. Demian Bichir (The Nun) plays her new partner, whose old partner previously went insane after visiting that same house following yet another strange murder. John Cho (Searching) is a realtor trying to sell the house, and Betty Gilpin (GLOW) is his pregnant wife, who just learned some very bad news about their baby. And somewhere in the middle, Frankie Faison (Banshee) invites Jacki Weaver (Bird Box) into the house to help his ailing wife, Lin Shaye (Insidious), with an assisted suicide.
Of the various storylines, John Cho and Betty Gilpin make the most of it. Their relationship is believable and dramatic even before the ghosts turn up to ruin everything, and they’re such incredible actors that they make the most out of all the contrived supernatural clichés. Then again, fans of the original Ju-On films may recognize most of their storyline from the original TV movies, and if so, they’ll probably also recognize just how much more apocalyptically disturbing it was the first time out.
Every other character in the new The Grudge seems trapped in a solemn tomb of a motion picture, which plays out with all the grim determination of a funeral march. The jump scares are almost uniformly perfunctory and ineffective. The sense of dread we’re clearly supposed to feel, as the noose tightens and fate turns sour, was too heavily foreshadowed to mean anything in the end. Only the film’s super creepy score, by The Newton Brothers (Doctor Sleep), gets a real charge. And even that’s more effective playing over the closing credits than it is playing over the actual events of the film.
It seems clear that the filmmakers know that these movies are scary, and that they don’t want anyone in the audience to be confused and accidentally have a good time. But by draining the film of its liveliness they remove all the contrasts that make the terrors so terrifying. The new The Grudge is a whole mood but not a whole movie, and ultimately feels lacking in personality, depth and entertainment value.
