SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
A derivative and fragmented reboot, The Grudge offers only cheap scares and an unoriginal take on its source material.
Early on in The Grudge, one of our characters is jump-scared by the franchise’s main ghost Kayako, as her hand lunges out of a bag of garbage to claw at her ankles. This little moment happens to be a rather unfortunate but apt metaphor for Nicholas Pesce’s reboot of a reboot. Seemingly at his direction, it commits two of the direst cardinal sins in moviemaking. As an adaptation, it has no unique take of its own, no fresh perspective, opting instead to rehash old stories and old scares. As a horror movie it’s dull more often than scary, and for horror fans, boredom is anathema. It’s emblematic of a movie industry too concerned with directionless reboots and sequels.
Set between 2004 and 2006, Pesce’s reboot brings the eponymous curse back to small town America on the back of nurse Fiona Landers (Tara Westwood), who returns from Japan after being thoroughly spooked by the franchise’s main ghost Kayako. Possessed by the vengeful ghost, Landers murders her husband and daughter before committing suicide, causing the curse to take root at her house on 44 Reyburn Drive. Over the next two years, it wreaks havoc on the house’s unwitting tenants before the newly arrived police officer Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough), discovers a body that leads her to investigate the property, putting her squarely in the sights of the evil entities lurking within.
All in all, it’s a little bland, with the newly minted R-rating used mostly to garner some extra shock value. The associated blood and gore, used sparingly to add extra shock and spice, is the only real welcome addition to the franchise here. Otherwise, The Grudge is largely about boredom interspersed with jump scares, whose competency is severely undercut by the fact that most of them have been done before in some shape or form. In a time where horror movie directors have tried to move beyond cheap jump scares, it’s difficult to stomach any film that has them. This movie might have been ground-breaking in the early 2000s.
A few big names have been lured into this cursed house; John Cho is tragically underutilised while Andrea Riseborough delivers a competent performance as a single mother tormented by a tragic past. Riseborough is the standout, as she benefits from being given the extra screen time to shine. They’re both joined by a surprising number of horror movie alumni. Demián Bichir, with one appearance in The Conjuring and another in Alien: Covenant under his belt thus far, plays Muldoon’s grizzled “I’ve seen some s*it” partner Goodman. Goodman, who has a suspiciously light workload, appears frequently to remind Muldoon not to get involved in the case. Naturally, this being your standard horror flick, Muldoon proceeds to get involved in the case, eventually seeking out Goodman who slowly feeds her titbits of information qualifying his previous statement, and feeding us exposition. It goes on like this for quite a while. Lin Shaye of Insidious fame rounds out the cast with a delightfully creepy performance as the demented old lady Mrs Matheson. Again, the film’s derivative nature undercuts her; a scene in which she plays peekaboo with a ghost has – you guessed it – been done before in a previous instalment.
The film’s structure is fundamentally fractured, with time skips and a non-linear progression which, rather than giving the film some enjoyable twists, only winds up frustrating the audience. The Grudge is inherently predictable because there’s really only one way the story can go, and nothing is gained from teasing the audience. It’s all too obvious what’s going to happen: at some point, the hapless tenants of the house are going to die gruesome deaths at the hands of the ghosts. Invariably, this happens in ways that permit more ham-fisted homages to previous films. There are also plenty of moments where it falls back on tired horror movie tropes; vomiting blood, creepy kids, faulty light bulbs, corpses, madmen with full knowledge of the supernatural: you name it, it probably features in one form or another. The whole film even carries a kind of filter that sucks out a lot of the colour, bleaching the film just in case the whole affair isn’t quite bleak enough for you already.
It’s a shame because underneath this mess, there’s a good horror movie trying desperately to pull free. There are moments where this film provides genuine frights and it builds a tense atmosphere capably. But for now, I remain unconvinced that anyone either wanted or needed this film. The Grudge remains an unwelcome reminder that Hollywood should really be doing something else with its time than making shaky, derivative reboots.
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