Mark Reviews Movies: THE GRUDGE (2020)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 3, 2020

It might come as a surprise to some that there have been 12 movies in the Ju-On series (translated into English as The Grudge), including three American variations on the material (and not including a pair of shorts that originated the idea). For those who may have missed the Japanese original (as well as its forebears and sequels) or the 2004 remake (and its subsequent sequels), the basic idea of the movies is that the ghosts of people who die in or because of a fit of rage haunt that place. Anyone who comes into contact with the location is cursed with the otherworldly grudge—destined to die violently.

The series seemingly continued because there was an almost limitless series of stories to add to this mythology. All it took was a person crossing the threshold of the cursed house for the curse to be passed, and if a death and/or killing took place elsewhere, in theory, that location would become cursed, too. Those who know the source material (or any horror movie that has spawned multiple sequels), though, might also realize that this endless cycle of violence, death, and apparitions is itself a curse.

The inevitable result is repetition, and in the case of this particular series, in which the stories are not told in a chronological order, there is no beginning and no real end. Repetition isn't just a consequence of the series. It's built right into the franchise's DNA.

Now we come to yet another movie called The Grudge, the not-so-lucky 13th in the series, which is both a reboot of and a direct sequel to, well, any of the previous movies, because time is more or less meaningless in this series. The movie opens in 2004, with an American woman cutting her trip to Tokyo short, after finding herself in the accursed home from the original series and/or the first remake. Something isn't right in that house, and when the woman returns home to Pennsylvania, she brings the angry curse with her. Sooner or later, she and her family are dead because of it.

As per usual, we learn and re-learn these facts over and over again. Writer/director Nicolas Pesce shows us an assortment of characters who indirectly and, then, very directly learn that a particular house is haunted with at least one rage-filled spirit, looking to pass on the violent grudge to anyone who dares to step foot inside the house. Many unwitting people do, and most of them die—or kill and then die—after being terrorized by a trio of ghosts.

Also as per usual, none of this is particularly suspenseful, not only because of our previous knowledge of the gimmick, but also because the movie itself offers no genuine sense of discovery. With the prologue and the quick revelation of both the violent deaths and the notion of a curse causing them, we're basically in the know from the very beginning. Pesce's task is to yet again give us a series of interconnected stories and characters, who encounter the house and its angry spirits at different times, and cut between those tales in such a way that the violence of each story occurs in the third act of the overarching narrative.

The main characters include police detective Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough), her partner Goodman (Damián Bichir), married real estate agents Peter (John Cho) and Nina (Betty Gilpin), an elderly couple named Faith (Lin Shaye) and William (Frankie Faison), and assisted-suicide consultant Lorna (Jacki Weaver). Most of these characters are already dead when we first meet Muldoon, a recent widow who has a young son (played by John J. Hansen), about whom Pesce mostly forgets until that third act—and then mostly remembers so that there can be one final twist at the very end.

While Muldoon investigates what happened at the cursed house, the plot jumps back and forth in time, watching as the real estate agents (In retrospect, the amusing thing is that the ghosts put the house on the market) evade the topic of a difficult pregnancy and as William enlists Lorna's help for the ailing Faith, who has started talking to an "imaginary" friend. The characters and stories here don't matter, of course, except to unravel the pieces of a mystery that isn't really a mystery. More to the point, they exist to be repeatedly startled by the gurgling/shrieking/popping-into-frame ghosts inside the house.

The Grudge is a slog of lifeless characters, repeatedly showing and telling us things we already know. That's the case until the actual lifeless characters appear, at which point the movie is just a slog of repetitious jump scares.

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