Film Review: The Grudge

Somehow the J-horror craze of the late 90s to mid 2000s has largely flew by me. My only real experience with some of those popular entries are the original Ring and its American remake, and I haven’t seen any of the Grudge films prior to this new reboot. Naturally, whenever there is an American filmmaker tackling a foreign property, there is plenty of ways things can go wrong from ideas that don’t translate culture to culture to the dumbing down of the original’s ideas into something that is more palatable to mainstream audiences, but done so to the point where it takes away everything that made compelling about the original in the first place.

With The Grudge, I was cautiously optimistic that we would have something interesting in our hands because it comes curtesy of writer/director, Nicolas Pesce, who took on this production, rewriting a script by Jeff Buhler for producer, Sam Raimi. Pesce burst onto the scene with a film that admittedly wasn’t my cup of tea, The Eyes Of My Mother, but I was very impressed by his follow up, Piercing. Both are quite distinct in tone and style and feel, so I didn’t know quite what to expect to see him handle a property like this.

In terms of premise, the film follows a Detective Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough), who recently moved to a new town with her son a few months after the passing of her husband. Not too long after settling in, Muldoon and her partner, Detective Goodman (Demián Bichir), are called to a scene of a crime where a body was found. Amongst the evidence is an address that Goodman has history with. Muldoon investigates, and looks into the case that Goodman avoids talking about, and finds herself into a rabbit hole of various people who are connected to that address that all ended up dead, the circumstances of which remain unclear, and potentially supernatural.

Since I haven’t seen any of the Grudge films prior to this, I can’t speak to how the film works off the original ideas of the series, whether it compliments them or bastardizes them. However, what I can say is that the film works fairly well on its own terms. It’s like Seven, but instead of investigating a serial killer, there’s a bloodthirsty spirit on the loose. Pesce and cinematographer, Zachary Galler (who also shot Piercing) give the film a gloomy and dreary look, full of desaturated colors and harsh Earthy color tones likes yellows and browns. It’s a dreary and at times downright ugly movie to look at, but it’s very much by design, and the score from the Newton Brothers add to the ominous atmosphere.

The way the story is told is somewhat fascinating. As Detective Muldoon looks into the various cases that are connected to the house, we flashback to these stories and follow those characters, but their whole story isn’t fully played out. It will cut away back to Muldoon, and the film will pick things up at later moments. Despite this, the film is never confusing, and you easily pick up where you are on the timeline, and when each individual plot thread does finish in the climax, it feels genuinely satisfying to watch unfold.

In one of these cases we have Lin Shaye and Frankie Faison playing an elderly couple, with the former being senile – or so it appears. Jacki Weaver also appears, and slowly realizes that there is more going on in the house their staying than she initially thought. There’s also a thread involving John Cho and Betty Gilpin playing a young couple who are also real estate agents, and how they unwittingly attract the attention of the evil spirit of the house. Even William Sadler pops up for a while as Goodman’s former partner who was obsessed with the case of the house, and got paranoid, and eventually institutionalized.

While the way Pesce explores these stories is interesting, it is just about the only interesting things going on here. The Grudge is a fairly light film with not a lot going on under the surface. It’s ultimately a fairly straightforward genre exercise that isn’t anywhere near as weird and idiosyncratic as something like The Eyes Of My Mother or Piercing, but it is elevated by the craftsmanship and the excellent performances from the cast, which is largely made up of character actors, who all bring enough personality and emotional heft to characters we don’t spend a whole lot of time with or get a lot of development for. For less patient moviegoers, it might be a little too bleak and dour, but I was surprised by how much I was able to get into it. It’s nasty, it’s mean, and pretty damn creepy on top of all that. It’s rock solid, and it makes me more interested to see what Pesce does next.