The Grudge (2020)
Directed & Written by Nicholas Pesce
Viewed in Theatre
I am going to do my best not to dunk too hard on The Grudge. Lord knows it’s already getting that from the audiences that gave it an ‘F’ on CinemaScore, so I don’t need to pile on this negativity bandwagon for the first horror film to be released in 2020. I’ll try to be as fair as possible and point out positives when they come up. That won’t be too often though, because The Grudge is not even close to a good movie.
Our Story That Is Explained To Us Many Times.
Our story centers on Detective Muldoon, a recently widowed mother of 1 who moved out to a small town in Pennsylvania for reasons probably relating to her husband being newly dead. While out with her new partner Detective Goodman, a walking cliche of a Hispanic man with a thick accent who is very religious and believes in spirits and shit, the two come across a peculiar car wreck that they learn is connected to a house with a storied past. While Muldoon becomes obsessed with this house, and the bizarre murders that occurred there, she begins seeing spooky visions after stepping into the house. Intercut with this is many sequences of the people who lived there before this all happened, explaining to the audience point-blank what the mystery is and how this all happened.
Yo Dawg We Heard You Hated Mysteries, So We Didn’t Bother With One.
Part of the problem with how this mystery unfolds is that it isn’t handled in the traditional sense of an investigation. The Grudge has a non-linear storytelling structure that flips between Muldoon looking into what happened and the events themselves unfolding before our eyes. You may ask what the point of Muldoon investigating is if we can just see it all happening and I don’t really have a good answer for that, sometimes we see Muldoon talking to someone about what happened, sometimes we see what happened happen, we get the same information either way. Because of this structure, many plot points are made several times between these two parts of the movie. To be fair, other Grudge movies use a similar style of storytelling. I don’t think it works for them either.
Why Did No One Like This?
If I can speculate, I assume the slow pacing, non-linear nature, and repetitive plotting of The Grudge is what turned a lot of people off to it. It’s a needless flourish that doesn’t make the story better, it just explains every single detail as if you were too stupid to understand basic story structure and no one likes being talked down to. The other reason I speculate as to why this movie is so hated is that it is not scary. At all. Every scare of the film is a jump scare and that gets tiresome before we even get through the first act. If I were watching this movie at home, I don’t know if the group I was with would have even finished it for how slow and simple it was.
Time To Be Mildly Positive.
Getting away from that negativity for a moment, there are things about The Grudge that I liked. Most everyone in the cast performed quite well, with a special shout out to John Cho and Lin Shaye who bring humanity and menace, respectively, to their sequences, which does elevate them above the material. Not to be down on Andrea Riseborough, who played Detective Muldoon, she’s doing the best with what she has but I never really understood who she was supposed to be or why she was doing what she was doing. Another positive! There is a lot of gross violence here which was well executed. I am a gorehound at heart and it does warm me a bit to see talented visual effects artists do their thing, even if what is happening doesn’t always make sense.
For Having So Much Going On, There Isn’t Anything Happening.
Aaaaand back to business as usual. Those solid performances from Cho and Shaye happened in the prequely bits and while they are some of the better stuff here they are also indicative of a big problem, which is that the movie introduces a lot of characters that we don’t get to know very well. Hell, the opening of the film introduces a whole family of people, in a pretty okay sequence, who seem like they’re going to be important to the story and they are but we barely learn anything about them. There’s a lot of effort put into giving everyone a couple character traits to make them unique but it isn’t enough to make you care about anyone or relate to anyone.
Have Any Atmosphere? Nah, All We’ve Got Are Jumpscares.
These things I’ve mentioned are all problems but getting back to the biggest problem with The Grudge is that it is not even mildly scary. There’s very little atmosphere to be found, so the only ‘scary stuff’ is jumpscares which get old real fast. I don’t hate jumpscares but when the only thing you can think of to try and engage the audience is to have a monster ghost scream into the camera then I have no clue what you were even trying to do. Sure, the gore effects are pretty good, sure there are lots of dark houses and semi-creepy locations, but there is nothing that brings this together and makes it all cohesive.
Why Did Pesce Make This?
What’s so weird about all this is that this movie came from Writer/Director Nicholas Pesce who directed two other films, one of which I haven’t seen, but I have seen his debut feature The Eyes of My Mother. I don’t want to get too much into but The Eyes of My Mother is incredibly unique, really disturbing, and quite memorable. I have no idea how the same person who made that pretty good atmospheric horror film also wrote and directed this very formulaic entry into The Grudge franchise. My only idea is that this had to be part of some package deal with Sony, where Pesce directed this and then got funding for the movie he actually wanted to make. That’s all I can hope for.
Time To Recommend Movies That Aren’t This!
I did my best to manage my expectations for a movie from a franchise I don’t particularly care for, but even with that generosity, I can’t recommend The Grudge to anyone. The story is too basic, the scares too predictable, and the characters not interesting enough to get invested in this ghost story. If you find the idea of revenge curses interesting and haven’t seen the original Japanese ‘The Grudge’ AKA ‘Ju-On’, I would definitely recommend that over this. Or if you were interested in something a bit more out there for Japanese horror, take a look at Noroi: The Curse on Shudder, it’s a great found footage flick. While I’m on the topic of recommending everything, check out The Eyes Of My Mother, its a pretty good bit of Indie Horror.
Nice job.
Thanks, I’m trying to see everything horror in theatres this year, which shouldn’t be as tough as last year because of Regal’s subscription program. January is usually a pretty bad month for horror but its always good to give these movies a shot.