The Grudge (2020)

Here we are with another take on The Grudge, a movie series that has been going on now, in some incarnation, for about twenty years. I have loved most of the movies in the series, from those I have seen, and hoped for the best from this, despite hearing some pretty scathing reviews. Sadly, it's a whole big pile of nothing.

Shown in the series-standard non-linear style, the basic story concerns a Detective Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough) and her young son, Burke (John J. Hansen) being affected by the cursed house. She is working with a Detective Goodman (Demián Bichir), who saw his partner (Detective Wilson, played by William Sadler) driven to madness by the house. There's also a tale of a young couple (John Cho and Betty Gilpin) going through some major horror, and an elderly couple (Lin Shaye and Frankie Faison) who show some terrible sights to someone visiting to discuss assisted suicide (Jacki Weaver).

Written and directed by Nicolas Pesce, The Grudge feels like a movie written by someone given a summary of the previous films, but no direct experience of them. There's no impressive atmosphere here, no consistency in the way scares are built, or delivered, and generally not much that makes it feel like a film in the series. The juggled chronology quickly becomes annoying, especially as it all leads to a finale that absolutely underwhelms.

Without intending to offend most of the people onscreen, the casting doesn't help. Riseborough is a particularly cold nominal lead, and her scenes with Bichir are quite abysmal. She fares better with Sadler,who is a definite highlight. The scenes involving Shaye, Faison, and Weaver are the best in the film, mainly due to their comforting familiarity, but both Cho and Gilpin are wasted in their story strand, as much for the sad inevitability of it all as for the lack of any solid scares.

Considering the films he has done before this, I am even struggling to figure out why anyone would think Pesce a good fit for the series. He seems to specialise in mood and strangeness, which may have been marked in his favour, while The Grudge does best when full of palpable dread, punctuated by major shocks.

And, as lame as this may sound, this take on the material also underuses some other strengths, namely some fantastic audio and visuals that have given fans goosebumps for years.

Very disappointing. You would be better going back to revisit the many other interpretations, sequels, and tangents that the series has had since the start.

3/10

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