THE GRUDGE (2020)

Studio:      Screen Gems
Director:    Nicolas Pesce
Writer:      Nicolas Pesce, Jeff Buhler
Producer:  Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert, Taka Ichise
Stars:     Andrea Riseborough, Demian Bichir, John Cho, Betty Gilpin, William Sadler, Frankie Faison, Tara Westwood, Dave Brown, Lin Shaye, Jacki Weaver

Review Score:

---

Summary:

Kayako’s curse moves from Japan to Pennsylvania as a murder house’s ghosts haunt families and police detectives across three timelines.

---

Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

2004 – Fiona Landers encounters Kayako Saeki’s ghost after visiting Kayako’s cursed Tokyo house where the Williams Family now lives. Fiona unknowingly carries the curse back to her home at 44 Reyburn Drive in Cross River, Pennsylvania. Eventually driven mad by ghostly sightings, Fiona murders her husband Sam and drowns her young daughter Melinda before killing herself.

Realtor Peter Spencer and his pregnant wife Nina learn their baby will likely be born with ALD. After their hospital visit, Peter stops by the Reyburn Drive home to have sale paperwork signed, but finds no one there. Having set foot inside the house, Peter soon begins having haunting visions.

Peter returns to the house and encounters Melinda Landers, but does not realize she is a ghost. The curse possesses Peter. Peter goes back home and murders Nina before killing himself.

2005 – Now living in the Landers house, William Matheson summons suicide doctor Lorna Moody to help his elderly wife Faith. After seeing that Faith talks to ghosts, Lorna deems her mentally unfit for euthanasia, but agrees to stay with the couple for a few days to monitor Faith.

Melinda’s ghost stalks Lorna while she patronizes a grocery store. When she returns to the Matheson house, Lorna finds Detective Wilson, who investigated the Landers murders, standing entranced on the front lawn. William calls Wilson’s partner Detective Goodman to come and get him. Driven mad by the curse, Wilson tries to shoot himself in Goodman’s car, but survives.

Lorna tells William she believes his house is haunted after seeing a ghost attack Faith. William admits he sees the ghosts too, but says they give him hope of an afterlife for Faith.

Lorna wakes the next morning to discover Faith killed her husband and cut off her own fingers in a fit of laughing dementia. Lorna hurriedly drives away from the house only for a ghost to cause her to crash in a remote section of forest.

2006 – Recently widowed and new to Cross River PD, Detective Muldoon partners with Detective Goodman to investigate Lorna Moody’s decayed corpse, which was only now discovered. Goodman conspicuously clams up when he learns Lorna connects to the same house where the Landers murders took place.

Curious, Muldoon investigates the Reyburn Drive house on her own. Muldoon finds William Matheson’s rotted corpse and Faith in a fit of madness. Faith is committed to a psychiatric hospital where she commits suicide by jumping down a stairwell.

After encountering Melinda’s ghost in the road, Muldoon goes to see Goodman. Goodman tells Muldoon how the Landers case drove his partner mad. Goodman also reveals that he refused to go inside the house because of its haunting energy.

Muldoon continues seeing ghosts while researching deaths linked to the Reyburn Drive house. Muldoon visits Detective Wilson in a psychiatric hospital. Wilson tells Muldoon that the “ju-on” curse goes back to Tokyo and warns that Muldoon will be haunted because she entered the grudged house. Wilson tries tearing out his eyes after Muldoon leaves. Audiotapes left behind by Wilson reveal more of the curse’s history to Muldoon.

After an encounter with the ghost of Sam Landers, Muldoon calls Goodman to discuss the haunting. Afraid the curse will come for her young son Burke, Muldoon goes to the Reyburn Drive house and relives the Landers murders while dousing the interior with gasoline. The curse manifests as a vision of Burke. Muldoon still starts the fire. The Burke vision becomes Melinda’s vengeful ghost as the house burns.

Muldoon reunites with the real Burke outside. However, ghosts follow Muldoon to her home and drag her down a hallway.

---

Review:

Other than “bad,” the dominant word I’d heard used to describe 2020’s “The Grudge” was “bleak.” Lumping together a number of social media takes as well as other published criticisms, audiences apparently found the movie’s oppressively dour mood to be extremely un-fun, even as horror entertainment.

I don’t know that I consider “The Grudge” bleak so much as glum. You expect dystopian thrillers framed around apocalyptic events to feature nihilistic grimness. When a routine haunted house yarn goes this hard on hopelessness, it’s just depressing, and not a necessity demanded by this sort of ghost story. If Debbie Downer were a horror movie instead of a Saturday Night Live skit, she would be “The Grudge.”

“The Grudge” takes place nonlinearly during 2004, 2005, and 2006. Various people pop up in each timeline and every single one of them has some sort of tragedy hanging over their heads and thus, over the entire atmosphere.

It’s not enough that one elderly couple deals with dementia, they’re looking into assisted suicide too. Another man tries killing himself in front of a friend, but survives in a psych ward after only disfiguring his face. New to the small Pennsylvanian town of Cross River, single mother Detective Muldoon lost her husband to cancer three months ago. She has grieving in common with her new partner Detective Goodman, whose terminally ill mother also died recently. While that duo mourns their past, realtors Peter and Nina Spencer fret for the future when they find out they’re pregnant with a child due to be born with a rare disease.

Weirdly worsening things are constant reminders of everyone’s ongoing pain. Goodman still has oxygen tanks morosely surrounding his mother’s empty deathbed, which for some reason sits in full view of his couch. Muldoon walks in on her young son frowning over the Lego set he never got to finish with his father. Even The Spencers have to drive home from their doctor’s dark news in pouring rain to parallel Nina’s tears.

Piling misery on top of misery is the only way “The Grudge” goes about developing drama. You could try arguing this sadness stays consistent with what other films establish about the “Ju-On” curse. But I can’t find additional narrative value in details such as learning the little boy found his father dead besides tightening vises already constricting these characters into boxes built exclusively out of dreariness.

What’s left over for a viewer to connect to outside of emotionally draining empathy? The detectives are only referred to by last names, making them more coldly impersonal than they inherently are. I don’t know how the film expects anyone to care about Muldoon’s kid either. His two scenes give the boy less than one minute of screen time before he becomes a mere plot device to facilitate part of the finale. A moment when Muldoon’s partner keeps him occupied by playing the R-rated cop comedy “48 Hours” could have been good for a laugh or to provide a brief bit of bonding. Instead, it’s yet another “why is this even included?” sequence of no meaningful import.

“The Grudge” isn’t just a baffling buzzkill. It’s also dreadfully dull. Those two strikes are all it takes to turn any horror movie into a disappointing disaster.

How do I bore thee? Let me count the clichés:

• One of the cops is a drinking, smoking stereotype who “can’t go down the same road again” because he remains haunted by a case from two years ago.
• If the “Ouija” movies didn’t fulfill your fair share of Lin Shaye as a crazy lady in an asylum, she plays more or less the same part here.
• Do you like exposition delivered via online research and newspaper clippings? If “The Grudge” were set in the 20th century, you can bet someone would have rolled through microfiche files at a library too.
• A scene of someone tiptoeing around a creepy house calling someone else’s name fits this flat formula so well, the film does it more than once.
• The climax includes a building going up in flames. Sigh.

More specific details aren’t discussed in this review because the story is so boilerplate, there’s not much to really recap. With a premise as threadbare as “bad things happened in this house once, so now everyone who sets foot inside ends up haunted,” the characters have only a minimal mystery to get to the bottom of, which only runs about a half-inch deep.

Talk about being down in the dumps. “The Grudge’s” hollow persona was born, raised, and died there. If you let it, the film will drag your disposition down into those doldrums too.

Review Score: 30

---