The Grudge

This 2020 reboot of The Grudge is a real sad sack of a movie.  It never musters the energy to be tense or even scary.  Instead, it wallows in the misery of its characters, who are not even developed enough for us to care about them.  We simply watch them go through their depressing, wasted lives, and then they enter a cursed haunted house, so they can be stalked by vengeful spirits who eventually kill them needlessly and cruelly.  Does any sane person think this is fun?

And yet, we have a great cast here who easily could have created some genuine drama out of this scenario.  Actors like John Cho, Lin Shaye, Frankie Faison, Jacki Weaver and William Sadler turn up, and actually seem to be making an effort.  More effort than this movie probably deserves, given how little it offers many of them to do.  This is an unsatisfying movie in just about every way.  If you're a fan of the original Japanese movie that started it all, or the 2004 Hollywood remake starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, you'll probably be disappointed with how little this one pays homage to them.  If you're looking for a genuine thrill or a spooky night out at the movies, this will supply nothing to make your pulse race.  And if you're looking for something substantial, just keep on looking, because this will only leave you feeling cheated and ripped off.

As in the earlier Grudge films, the action centers on a haunted house that has a long history of claiming the lives of anyone who enters it.  The movie is told out of sequence for reasons I don't know, and shows various doomed people involved with the house for one reason or another over the years.  You would think the fact that everyone who has lived in or set foot in the house has turned up dead would raise a few red flags either with the neighbors or the local police, but not here.  The hauntings begin when a woman (Tara Westwood) returns home to the U.S. from working in Japan.  The house she was in over there was haunted, and the ghosts supposedly followed her home, and possessed her to murder her husband (David Lawrence Brown), cute daughter (Zoe Fish) and finally herself.  Now their home is haunted by both the murdered family, and I think the original Japanese ghost from the previous movies.

The movie jumps about to different points of time in no particular order to show us the various victims that the house has claimed over the years.  These include a real estate couple (John Cho and Betty Gilpin), who are trying to sell the house at one point, but have their own issues to deal with concerning an impending pregnancy.  There's also an elderly couple (Lin Shaye and Frankie Faison) who hire a woman (Jacki Weaver) to perform an assisted suicide, only for all to end up being victims of the grudge-bearing spirits within the house.  Even people in close proximity to the house are not spared, as a police detective who is sent to investigate the initial family murder (William Sadler) becomes obsessed to the point of madness, and starts seeing spooky hallucinations everywhere he goes.  The main character is supposed to be another police detective named Muldoon (Andrea Roseborough), who starts piecing together the violent history of the house.  But given that writer-director Nicolas Pesce forgot to give her a personality, she never comes across as someone we can get behind.

While all of this is happening, not once does The Grudge generate any sense of fear.  The tone is sluggish, and quite solemn.  If the characters in this movie were cartoons, they'd all be drawn walking around with rain clouds following them around and hovering over their heads.  Everyone talks in passive, raspy tones, like they're afraid to raise their voice.  The skies are dark, and sad violin and piano music dominates the soundtrack.  Look, I did not expect this to be a happy movie, but this goes to such extremes to create a depressing atmosphere that it goes into self-parody.  Also, this is the wrong mood for a thriller like this.  We want to be on the edge of our seats, to be waiting for the next ghoul to come jumping out of the shadows.  This movie wallows so much in its depression that it forgets to deliver on anything resembling horror.

Perhaps to make up for this, the filmmakers have decided to go over the top with the violence and gore, making this the first film in the franchise to get an R-rating. (The earlier films were PG-13.) So, we get to delight in seeing little girls getting drowned in a bathtub, a man brutally murder his pregnant wife, and a woman chop off her own fingers.  In one of the more extreme moments, we see this same woman throw herself off a hospital stairwell, and literally explode in a bloody mess when she hits the ground below.  I understand that these scenes were thrown in for shock value, but in a movie like this where not much happens, it feels more like a vain effort to wake up the audience.  It's there only to give the audience something to talk about when it's over. ("Well, the movie wasn't that great, but man, did you see the way that one woman exploded?")

The Grudge is a joyless film that deserves to be avoided.  However, it's the only new movie in wide release this weekend, so it's bound to make some money.  How sad that people will turn to this looking for some cheap thrills, and all they're going to get is a long, depressing slog of a film with short bursts of violence. 

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