The Grudge review: New grudge, new problems, all boring

If a Grudge movie has no cultural specificity, isn’t it just a haunted house movie? Yes, but try telling the creators of the remake that.

In 2002, the Japanese horror feature Ju-on: The Grudge was released, becoming the perfect launchpad for America’s obsession with remaking Japanese horror for American audiences. Its Americanized remake, The Grudge in 2004, attempted to be a hybrid of two worlds by keeping the Japanese location and inserting American actors.

Two lackluster sequels later, and we’re now in a new decade, which means a new Grudge is demanded. Who demanded that is anyone’s guess. The Grudge (2019) is a film so boring and uninteresting they couldn’t bother to conjure up a unique name in spite of throwing out 99 percent of the original sources, both American and Japanese. Despite an utterly amazing cast whose appearance in this is enough to cause doubt in their life choices, this Grudge match is little more than a petty slapfest.

The 2004 film followed an American caregiver living in Japan, who enters a cursed house containing the soul of a woman scorned and her family. Starting off in 2006, we meet Detective Muldoon (a perpetually wild-eyed Andrea Riseborough) who has just moved to a small town in Pennsylvania with her son after the death of her husband. Funny how we get all this backstory to make us care about her character but never learn her first name.

Muldoon is teamed up with a loner detective — also lacking in first name — Goodman (Demian Bichir). What he lacks in personality is supposedly literally implied in his last name, so there. The two stumble upon a dead body in the woods that appears to be tied to a previous case of Goodman’s involving a murdered family. How does this tie back to Japan and the grudge? Like all good patient zeroes, the woman who murdered her family worked at the first Grudge house.

So, what initially started in 2004 as a culturally specific horror feature has been appropriated by dumb Americans who don’t understand. Director and screenwriter Nicolas Pesce creates a thin, tangential bridge between this feature and the 2004 iteration, turning the “grudge” into the haunted house equivalent of a virus. It’s actually more of a poltergeist, but safe to assume Pesce already knew there was a remake of that film.

Nearly everything you enjoyed about the 2002 feature, or even the 2004 film, is gone. Junko Bailey is credited on IMDb as “Kayako Ghost,” a reference to the ghost woman from the original film, though we just see a black CGI face or the back of her head once in a while, and this new movie doesn’t mention anything about her character. In fact, the rules of “the grudge” itself, wherein a person dying in the grips of a powerful rage creates a curse, don’t ever come up! This is presented as opening text to establish some type of history, but no one ever dies enraged for any reason. The curse is treated like the common cold.

As Muldoon mires herself in discovering how the string of dead bodies are related to each other, it instigates a series of flashbacks. One takes places in 2005 and involves Faith Matheson (Lin Shaye), who is perceived to be in the grips of mental illness by her husband who enlists the help of an assisted suicide doctor played by Jacki Weaver. Another flashback goes back to 2004, following real estate agent Peter Spencer (John Cho) and his wife Nina (Betty Gilpin), struggling with the fact the baby they’re about to have has a deadly illness. If it sounds like this last plotline has nothing whatsoever to do with the movie, you’re correct. Cho and Gilpin are spotlighted in the bulk of the film’s marketing despite their screentime adding up to about 25 minutes. It’s a shame because, separated from the Grudge world, their plotline has the narrative’s strongest moments. Cho and Gilpin have wonderful chemistry. The audience wants to follow their lives, and if this was a standard domestic drama, it might have had merit.

It’s hard to figure out what any of these performers saw in the script short of dollar signs. Shaye provides her standard operating creepiness while Weaver screams, runs, and asks what’s going on. Riseborough tries to inject some type of addictive mentality to her character’s mad consumption with the case, but it goes nowhere. Bichir doesn’t even have that, left to chronically remind Riseborough’s Muldoon to stop digging.

It’s apparent Pesce was influenced more so by Mike Flanagan’s Haunting of Hill House miniseries than the original Grudge. Every frame of film is passed through a sepia tone filter to convey nostalgia, while Muldoon’s discoveries show how the ghost/grudge/thing reflects everyone’s inner fears or closest confidantes. But the script only utilizes relationships to show extreme violence and gore. The nostalgia this film conjures up is that of the torture-porn era of horror filmmaking, as this movie bathes itself in violence, whether that’s showing a pregnant woman drenched in blood or a presumably beautiful scene of a woman throwing herself off a flight of stairs (in slo-mo for maximum impact…literally). Scenes of broken bones, broken fingers, eye-gouging, heads being slammed into marble, or just blood gushing take on greater resonance than the characters we’re meant to care about. The film’s final frames hold eerie similarities to the recent Pet Sematary remake, too, another instance of a bad film already doing something terrible.

At 93 minutes, what is perceived as a slow burn is drawn out and painfully dull. The Grudge is another remake no one asked for, and the characters imply that as well. If you enjoy confused actors wandering aimlessly in search of a jump scare, you’re in luck. Prepare to have your own grudge after seeing this.

The Grudge is currently playing in theaters.