THE GRUDGE (2020) Review
An integral part of the J-horror boom that defined the early 2000s, Takashi Shimizu’s 2000 film Ju-on: The Curse spawned Ju-on: The Grudge in 2002, which then spawned the American-made (but still Shimizu-directed) The Grudge in 2004. The hallmark of the franchise is a fractured narrative approach to a relatively standard ghost story, one that infuses a deadly curse into the mix to tell the tale of a house that quite literally infects anyone who enters.
Multiple sequels — and even a spinoff fight film between lead villain Kayako and The Ring’s Sadako! — fill out both the Japanese and American franchises, but for the purposes of this particular conversation, the only film that really matters is 2004’s The Grudge. The American remake of the Japanese classic is used as the jumping off point for director Nicolas Pesce’s new take on The Grudge, a sort of sequel/remake hybrid that aims to continue the storyline from the previous Sam Raimi-produced remake — and yes, Raimi produced this one as well.
Set in 2004 and other years pre-smart phone, The Grudge 2020 introduces a new character intertwined with the events of The Grudge 2004, a service worker who also stepped foot inside the house that tormented Sarah Michelle Gellar all those years ago. When she returns home to America, she brings the horror with her, infecting her own house with the deadly curse that cannot be stopped. Yes, America gets Grudge’d in The Grudge 2020, and it’s up to a detective (Andrea Riseborough) to piece together the timeline-hopping events.
The Grudge has been saddled with a nonlinear narrative from the beginning, and while the 2004 film failed to make that approach work in its favor, playing out like a mess of bite-sized storylines with no central focus, the most pleasant surprise in regards to The Grudge 2020 is that the fractured timeline is put to far better use than it typically has been by the franchise. Pesce, who also wrote the movie, gives his Grudge an anthology feel, weaving together a few different storylines and using Riseborough’s anchoring character as the sort of “host” who introduces them; as she uncovers new info, we’re shown those events in flashback.
The players here include a young couple dealing with a difficult pregnancy, played by John Cho and Betty Gilpin; an older man (Frankie Faison) whose wife (Lin Shaye) is so deathly ill that he’s hired a caregiver (Jacki Weaver) for the purpose of giving her a peaceful/assisted death at their home; and a detective (William Sadler) who hasn’t been the same since he stepped foot inside the house that has set its supernatural sights on all of the above.
By weaving between these different periods of time and providing us with tragic snapshots of the many lives that have been ravaged by the house, Pesce is able to effectively paint a picture of a curse so cruel and horrifying that nobody is safe from it — kind older folks, expectant mothers and young children included — and that nobody can stop once it grabs hold of them. It helps that the cast is terrific all around, with Cho and Gilpin in particular using the limited screen time they’re afforded to create characters you have no trouble caring about. These various different snapshots may never quite get the individual time they deserve — and it kinda makes you wonder why the franchise even insists on being so beholden to the narrative approach Takashi Shimizu established back in 2000 — but the well-cast actors in each segment are all good enough to get the job done and invest you in their horrifying plights.
And their plights are indeed horrifying, as Pesce uses the film’s “R” rating to really dig in those knives and spill copious amounts of blood. The Grudge has mostly been a PG-13 franchise, and while it could be argued that the gore found in Pesce’s vision doesn’t do much to actually enhance the story, it could also be argued that it allows him to create the most evil depiction of the franchise’s trademark curse that we’ve seen on screen to date. This curse takes no prisoners, ensuring that everyone who comes into contact with it is dispatched in the most gruesome of ways, and gore-hounds in particular will appreciate the nastiness of it all.
Of course, gore is hardly a key ingredient in ensuring that a movie is actually scary, and The Grudge 2020 does indeed struggle with conjuring up effective scares. Almost every scene is punctuated with a loud ‘n cheap jump scare, and Pesce is never quite able to build up any real dread or sustained tension of any kind. It’s clear from the early going that there’s little more than a quick jump scare around every corner, and though jump scares are no doubt an effective form of scaring an audience — for what it’s worth, my crowd was jumping and hollering at all the right moments — seasoned horror fans are sure to predict every single jump and very likely roll their eyes at how frequently Pesce goes to that particular well.
Pesce also fails to create a memorable new set of villains to fill the shoes of Kayako and Toshio — Kayako herself does make a very, very brief appearance in the opening scene, however — as his tormented ghosts of the past are as generic as they come. And while their wrath is felt more brutally than perhaps ever before from the franchise, they never quite manage to send chills up the spine. Again, that all comes down to the film’s over-reliance on jump scares, which sadly don’t allow for Pesce to truly make us terrified of his specters.
At the end of the day, The Grudge films are fairly generic ghost stories presented within a unique narrative structure, and Nicolas Pesce admirably uses that framework to make a pretty damn solid Grudge movie. He also makes the franchise a bit more his own, infusing it with grim and gruesome new delights. It’s predictable and all of the characters’ fates are clearly written on the walls long before they realize it, but The Grudge 2020 is an effectively nasty spookshow all the same. And it’s bolstered by strong human drama at the core of it all.
Perhaps all this one needed to be was better than the 2004 film. And indeed it very much is.
