J-horror had a huge impact on Western cinema in the late 90s, thanks to Ringu (1998), which led to a lot of American remakes. Takashi Shimizu remade his own film, Ju-On: The Grudge (2002), for an American audience in 2004 starring Sarah Michelle Gellar. There have been two sequels to this so far, but producer Sam Rami and director Nicolas Pesce decided to switch it up a little with The Grudge (2020)—a sidequel that takes places during and after the events of the 2004 film.
In 2004, live-in nurse Fiona Landers (Tara Westwood) leaves a house in Tokyo after being disturbed by the events that took place there. She encounters the ghost of Kayako Saeki before returning home to her husband, Sam (David Lawrence Brown), and their young daughter, Melinda (Zoe Fish), in Pennsylvania. However, Kayako’s curse possesses Fiona, causing her to bludgeon Sam and drown Melinda before stabbing herself in the throat.
In 2006, Detective Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough) moves to town with her son Burke (John J. Hansen) after her husband’s recent death. Muldoon and her new partner, Detective Wilson (Demián Bichir), are called to the woods where they find the corpse of a woman in a car. Goodman becomes uncomfortable when learning that the deceased woman had been visiting 44 Reyburn Drive—the house where Fiona murdered her family. Recalling the case, Goodman tells Muldoon that he refused to step foot in the house because it made him feel uneasy. His old partner, Detective Wilson (William Sadler), however, did enter the house and met an unfortunate fate after the curse caused drove him crazy.
Intrigued by the story, Muldoon visits the house in question alone and meets Faith Matheson (the remarkable Lin Shaye), who struggles with dementia, and uncovers the decomposing corpse of her husband William (Frankie Faison). Since she entered the house, Muldoon finds herself unable to shake the curse. The plot intertwines her life with the Landers, the Spencers and the Mathesons, who are all connected by 44 Reyburn Drive.
While the non-linear structure is a staple of the film franchise, it seems to be in lieu of an actual overarching plot. The families are quite interesting, especially John Cho and Betty Gilpin’s Peter and Nina Landers, who completely pull you in with their captivating performances. But just as we start to become emotionally invested in their story, it switches to someone else—which means we don’t get to form strong bonds with the characters. Muldoon herself is fundamentally boring and doesn’t have any character development. Just like with the other families, the film doesn’t allow us to build any empathy towards her because we’re too busy going back and forth between timelines—ones that she can’t even fully explore, making her profession underutilised.
Instead, the story is told to us quite passively as it explores each family who has the misfortune to interact with the curse—and we don’t even get the luxury of having this in chronological order. It has so much to cover that Muldoon’s son effectively disappears for the majority of the film and you wonder if you imagined his existence until he returns later. The filmmaking is competent from a technical standpoint, but it doesn’t do anything to counter the poor script and characterisation. Everything is devoid of life, but the watered-down colour palette at least captures the coldness of it all.
There are genuine scares in The Grudge, though they’re of the expected jump kind, but the ghosts don’t seem as scary as they did in Ju-On. Sure, they’re eerie thanks to sound cues and atmosphere, but they actually look terrible, especially for 2020. It always feels like there’s something missing concerning the film’s antagonist—aka the curse. Perhaps there are just no good stories left to tell within The Grudge universe, but that’s not something I want to believe.
Its concept is such a fascinating and frightening part of Japanese folklore that to not explore the trauma and pain that create new or continue old curses seems like a huge misfire. To me, that’s what makes these films scary. That’s the thing that leaves an impact on its audience. When the film reaches its big climax with Muldoon, it feels both underwhelming and underdeveloped as we don’t have any attachment to her character. This is a shame because the ending is actually really great and it would’ve hit harder had the film spend time developing… well, anything really.
Ultimately, The Grudge lacks emotion. It feels like an empty shell of the films that came before it. Somehow it’s even worse than the 2004 remake. There are definitely some good ideas in it, but they’re drowned out by the overall blandness of the script. If anything, it has some fantastic nods to the previous films as it recreates some of the original scares. These definitely stand out as a positive. This isn’t anything special, but there’s no denying that, no matter how bad these films look or are, we’re still drawn to them and we always will be. It’s hard to deny them as a staple in horror culture, even if they’re bad.
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