The Grudge (2020) - Movie Review

Time for some 2000’s nostalgia, although we’re not gonna be looking at any of the fun things about that decade. Instead, we’ll be having a good, long gander at the 2000’s J-horror remake trend. It was one of the weirder bits of cultural exchange this side of the new millennium, with Western filmmakers (primarily Sam Raimi and Gore Verbinski, among others) remaking classic Japanese horror films, the results of which were mostly utter garbage. While Verbinski’s The Ring was an okay geographical shift, the rest of the mass including Pulse, One Missed Call, The Eye, Mirrors, and even the Raimi-produced Grudge remake brings down the median. Like, really brings it down. And with this latest, decidedly-American revival of one of the main pillars in that trend, I can’t help but question whatever point this was meant to serve.

The Japanese side of horror cinema, among many other signifiers, is one that puts a lot of emphasis on sound design to make its mark. And it shows in what most people remember from even the remake wave, like the death rattle croaking of The Grudge or the "seven days" catchphrase of The Ring. They stand out because those films didn’t overload the sound mix, using noise sparingly to build on the atmosphere. If this is already sounding very unlike what American filmmakers aim for horror, you’re already on track to figuring out this film’s first major problem.

Apart from the death rattle being so overused that it loses any effect or even relevance within the story itself, the constant reliance on soundtrack-punctuated jump scares is really damn draining here. I’ve grown quite fond of The Newton Brothers’ work over the last few years, them being regular collaborators with Mike Flanagan, but as much as they genuinely try to set up mood with their compositions, the bulk of their resulting impact comes from the editors banking on egregiously tired clichés.

And speaking of the editing, the pace of this film is pretty dire as well. It follows the other Grudge films, both the originals and the American versions, in how it presents its story in non-chronological order, following three separate families who occupy the main house and succumb to the curse within. However, rather than giving the story a sense of variety or a prevailing sense of continuing doom, one of the bigger pulls of the series as a whole, it just ends up making everything feel muddled. It doesn’t do much to justify this approach, as we don’t get a whole lot of development for any of the characters we’re shown, and because the atmosphere is so paper-thin, none of the individual plot lines are particularly engaging on their own, let alone when dragged kicking and screaming into the same timeline.

What makes that worse is how the non-linear storytelling is about as much of the original Grudge identity as there is to be found here. If anything, it feels like just about any other haunted house movie, albeit with vaguely East Asian decorations in a couple corners. Nicolas Pesce’s writing makes some attempt to expand on the morbid themes of the series proper, showing different varieties of grief through the three different inhabitants, but it never hits on anything that makes it worth being attached to a Grudge sequel (or mid-quel or reboot or whatever the hell this is supposed to be). It legit gets to a point where a TV turns itself on, and for a split second, it feels more like a Ring sequel than anything to do with The Grudge. And to think that Pesce wants to follow this up with a cross-over between the franchises; much like with other ambitions for shared cinematic universes, he should’ve focused on making one good film first.

Then again, even if this wasn’t attached to a pre-existing franchise, I doubt this would’ve turned out much better because Pesce’s writing shows a lot of wonkiness throughout. It starts out on a weird note with Andrea Riseborough promising something to her son and mentioning how that promise “means more because I’m a police officer”, and it stays on that perpetually tacky note throughout. The characterisation is lame, the attempts at tension-breaking quips even more so, and if I never have to hear Lin Shaye say "peekaboo" again, I might be able to avoid being cursed in the afterlife myself.

I’d call this only the latest example of how much Western filmmakers don’t get what makes J-horror so effective, but this barely even feels like something born of the Japanese imagination, even tangentially. It’s so watered-down with mishandled timelines, weak horror clichés that make the film’s attempts at period detail seem metatextual in reviving tired 2000’s filmmaking tropes (the digital blood effects look really bad), and a general lack of identity that this could be re-released with every Grudge connection removed and no-one would bat an eye. If anything, that might help this film’s reception, as it would stop being another reminder of why that initial wave of J-horror remakes died in the first place.