“It is said in Japan that when a person dies in extreme sorrow or rage, the emotion remains, becoming a stain upon that place. Death becomes a part of that place, killing everything it touches. Once you have become a part of it, it will never let you go.”
The Grudge begins with a fantastically shocking scene. Peter (Bill Pullman) wakes up one morning next to his wife, steps out onto their bedroom balcony, and hurls himself over the railing and onto the street several stories below. We only come to an understanding of what this means near the end because the story, insofar as it can be considered a story, is conveyed completely out of order simply to cause confusion. The basic gist is there’s a haunted house where a double-murder-suicide occurred and the lingering rage of that event can materialize and kill people. And it has a ripple effect, so those people kill more people and so on and so forth. This requires a handful of typically dumb horror movie characters to stick their noses into dark corners and return to places any sane person would not along with some very sketchy logic and sequencing. But that’s just how it goes. Fans of cheap scares will be delighted as there are several terrific set pieces. And if that’s all you’re after, you probably won’t care if it adds up or not, so go ahead and knock yourself out. The issue I take with the film is that, although the scary moments are plentiful, they’re all self-contained. There’s no building sense of dread or pervasive unease—it all boils down to waiting for the creepy villains to pop out from behind the curtain, repeated ad nauseum. It occasionally works but the characters are so unbelievable and the story so jumbled that any sense of tension is fumbled.
If there’s a main character, it’s Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Karen Davis, a substitute housekeeper who is filling in for Yoko (Yōko Maki). Her job is to take care of Emma (Grace Zabriskie), who barely says anything due to her lethargy and dementia but is creepy by virtue of Zabriskie’s unique face and possessed demeanor. As Karen enters the house, she notices plenty of odd things, but we don’t know if they’re odd or not. There’s a door that’s taped shut, a weirdly prominent cat, and a little boy hiding behind a door. Then a telephone rings and scares the daylights out of Karen, only for her to barely react at all when a floating demonic spirit hovers over Emma and kills her.
So people go missing and an investigation is launched by Detective Nakagawa (Ryo Ishibashi). Alex Jones—no, not that Alex Jones, this one is played by Ted Raimi, brother of Sam, who produced the film—the director of the care center, works with Nakagawa and tries to make sense of things, tying our timeline into a bunch of needless knots. There are many references to when things occurred in the past without any sense of when the present is. Maybe it all makes sense but why is the job of untangling that ball of yarn thrust onto the viewer? There’s no justification for the disorder. (I’m pretty sure it doesn’t actually make sense.) Thankfully, there are also plenty of transportation scenes where characters travel in what seems like real time—this gives us time to ponder this deep mystery and also conveniently bloats the runtime since the remake cuts out a section of the original’s narrative to make it easier to understand.
No rhyme or reason is ever given for how The Grudge—I guess that’s what the evil spirit is called?—chooses its victims. It certainly shows a preference for characters who are alone, but there’s no pattern to its slayings. Initially, it’s tied to the house—the scene of the crime. But then it starts doing its creaking-door voice through the phone and visiting places where it doesn’t make sense for it to be. In some cases, if you can ignore all of the terribly contrived setup, the exact moment of the scare works. There’s one instance where Susan (KaDee Strickland) retreats to her bed in fear and huddles under the covers—a defense mechanism that should stop working around the time you turn six years old—and then Kayako (Takako Fuji) appears under the covers and sucks her down into the bed. Or when Karen is rinsing her hair in the shower and a hand literally comes out of her head. Stuff like that, and the little boy Toshio (Yuya Ozeki) popping up randomly, are when the film is at its best. That’s unfortunate, because that’s not very good. It all “culminates” in a sort of living flashback where Karen witnesses a scene that she was not actually present for. She can see Peter but he can’t see her. But he can feel her presence somehow. It’s the kind of thing that’s creepy in a vacuum, but when you’re watching a feature length film it needs to be worked into the fabric of the thing, and it’s not. None of the scenes are. They’re all just moments of maximum shock value stitched together into a roughspun whole.
The Grudge is just a huge mess, if I haven’t been clear about that. But as the box office regularly reminds me, films don’t have to be coherent or in any way meritorious to make a ton of money. The Grudge fits that model perfectly, raking in $180M+ against a $10M budget. After the success of The Ring—a cash-grab American remake of J-horror classic Ringu—American studios looked to replicate it. Japanese director Takashi Shimizu had directed several films in his Ringu knock-off series called Ju-on, and the third one was selected for Americanization. For some reason they decided to keep it set in Japan but have everyone speak English, which doesn’t make any sense but was needed to draw in English-speaking audiences while retaining the Japanese flavor.
Whatever. There’ve inexplicably been three more movies produced in the series, so some people must actually like this stuff.