Review: The Grudge Spectacularly Fails to Defy the January Doldrums

Writer-director Nicolas Pesce’s reboot of the 2004 American remake of Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On: The Grudge also revolves around a spooky house where a hairy ghost prone to gross mouth noises reigns supreme. On-screen text helpfully informs us that when someone dies violently, a curse is born. Spreading from its point of origin like a virus, the curse dooms all who come into contact with it to notice some jolting, bloody specter out of the corner of their eye. And all of it feels as anonymous and familiar as your average January time-waster, with Pesce evincing little of the promise he showed in his prior films (The Eyes of My Mother, Piercing), and even less drive to remake the old into something new.

Throughout the film, Detective Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough) stalks around in the dark and sorts through case files, with her investigation providing the story’s fragmented structure. In various overlapping timelines, eminently overqualified actors like John Cho, Betty Gilpin, Frankie Faison, and Jacki Weaver appear frightened as their characters are systematically “grudged.” All together, these workmanlike scenes operate like a disjointed scare festival of ludicrously generic frights: an ominous kid in the road, a bad thing in the bathtub, an entity hiding in the closet, and a ghost that initially shows up on the security camera footage only to be absent from later playback. There are even menacing psych ward patients.

Muldoon’s partner, Goodman (a luxuriously mustachioed Demián Bichir), ominously notes at one point that she should back off, and as the film moves from one character to the next, there’s a constant sense that The Grudge is building to something or other, that it will eventually have something to say. Nearly everyone is connected by some kind of grief. Surely this director, this cast, and this belated revival have some original idea between them. In that regard, the film offers precisely one effective scene, where Faison’s character explains how the haunted house loaded with hair monsters actually gives him hope for being together with his wife after death. And then we’re back to business when he’s murdered a few minutes later.

Even worse than some sloppy, amateurish creation, this is a minimally competent personality vacuum that, in spite of its gorier approach to horror compared to the original, can’t match Shimizu’s flair for memorable imagery. Shimizu’s specters always looked wrong, with ghastly white appearances that made their presence seem jarring. By comparison, Pesce’s nondescript ghosts just look interchangeable. Indeed, as they shuffle and groan in the background of many scenes, it becomes difficult to even muster any surprise at the film’s lack of imagination.