The Grudge (2019 Review)
The Grudge Just Doesn’t Have the Same Malevolence.
New year means new movies and first up for 2020 is The Grudge. Not to be confused with the original Japanese horror film, Ju-On: The Grudge, or the 2004 American remake, which was also produced by Sam Rami who worked on this newest version as well. The Grudge is more of a spin-off than a remake. The being said, it doesn’t really offer anything new to the franchise. It’s still using the same old scares and themes that made the first films so exciting… 16 years ago. Sure, there are parts of The Grudge that will make you jump or cringe, but none of it will stay with you like the originals. The first The Grudge made me scared to turn my lights off after seeing it, the new one, well, it made me scared that the rest of January would be filled with more “meh” movies.
The newest The Grudge goes full American. Meaning that instead of just having an American actress in Japan, the infamous curse from the original films hops a plane to the good old U.S. of A. This newest film features a number of stories about those affected by the cures, but the one in the center focuses on a Detective (Andrea Riseborough) who is investigating exactly what happened at the house that ties all these horrible cases together. Her new partner (Demián Bichir) warns her to stay away, but we wouldn’t have much of a horror movie if she listened. Needless to say, she takes it upon herself to look even deeper and finds herself to be the newest recipient of the curse. Now she has to find a way to break it before it’s too late.
Director Nicolas Pesce released the sadomasochistic sexual thriller Piercing in 2018, so I was hoping that he’d bring some of that same foreboding tension to The Grudge. While there are certainly some moments that will leave you cringing in anticipation, Pesce decides to focus more on imagery than suspense this time around. There are some truly gut-wrenching scenes in this film including way too many compound fractures (any more than one is too many for me). While they’re certainly gross and hard to look at, they’re not exactly haunting, especially since there are a number of scenes that clearly use CGI blood instead of practical effects and just look fake. Some of the ghosts are pretty messed up looking, but none of them are nearly as terrifying at the original. Sure, the new creepy dead kid (Zoe Fish) is pretty off-putting, but she doesn’t strike nearly as much fear in your heart as the yowling ghost boy from the first remake.
Surprisingly, The Grudge has a pretty stellar cast. Bichir is terrific at playing “gruff” and he brings that talent to bear as the jaded partner who’s seen so much over the past few years that he’s reaching his breaking point. You’ll also recognize John Cho as an ill-fated realtor who makes the tragic mistake of actually going inside the house at one point. Most surprising to me were the appearance of modern horror icon Lin Shaye (from the Insidious series) and Academy Award winner Jacki Weaver. There is some serious talent on screen here, and what’s really noticeable is that The Grudge strayed from the horror cliche that all victims are ridiculously hot. Instead, the film seems filled with real people. Not to say any of them are unattractive, but they’re certainly not your typical Hollywood eye candy. They still bring a lot with them to their roles, but there really isn’t anything especially juicy for them to work with. The dialogue never goes deeper than it has too, which is a shame because the previous films really emphasized the darkness and suffering that led to the creation of such a curse. Instead, the scenes between the living seem shallow and pointless.
Pesce also plays down a lot of the aesthetics in the film. The cars are classic Chevy Caprices back from a time when cars were landlocked boats. Riseborough wears her hair pulled back in a ponytail throughout the film, allowing her face to take on an almost skull-like appearance as the film goes on. Of course, Bichir is unshaven and wearing mismatched layers of plaid. It all adds to an underlying grittiness of the film. This grittiness is meant to create a scenes of festering as though the curse were a disease infecting everything it touched. I mentioned the repeated use of compound fractures, but Pesce also loves the recurring imagery of flies buzzing about. They’re meant to be a visual metaphor for the rot that radiates from the home, and one scene with a ton of maggots really drives that point home. The thing is that The Grudge is so damn slow at points that all it can really do it offer up those “visual metaphors” to remind us that something scary might eventually happen. While buzzing flies might be annoying, they’re a poor substitute for suspense.
What I liked best about The Grudge was the story structure that revealed what happened in the past as part of Riseborough investigation. The downside is that we all know what’s going to happen to the characters before they’re even introduced. There are also so many stories being tied together, The Grudge also takes a long time to really get started. This makes the movie feel long, much longer than its hour and a half run time. It’s slow an awful lot of the time and not necessarily in a good way. The end result is a movie that seems to have a few genuinely good ideas but can’t really pull any of them off. Its association with the previous The Grudge films is more of a detriment than anything else because it simply can’t live up to the aspects we loved about them. Making it a completely original film might have made it at least good. Instead, The Grudge is simply bland and uninspired.
