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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Netflix And Chill: Piercing (2018)

Piercing is weird. There's no other way to describe it. It starts weird, gets weirder, and then manages to get even weirder. Whether you like it or not, well, that's not something you will be able to glean from many reviews. I ended up liking it, and liking it a fair bit, but there were many times when it could have easily just completely lost me.

Christopher Abbott plays Reed, a man with some problems, to put it mildly. He wants to get a prostitute and cause her a lot of harm, ending in death. He ends up having Jackie (Mia Wasikowska) sent to his room. Jackie might be a very suitable victim, or she might end up being something more. And, considering how often we see Reed hearing unusual dialogue from other people who encourage him to follow his urge, it's impossible to really figure out just how much of what we're seeing is real and how much is just how Reed views his world.

The second film from writer-director Nicolas Pesce (I have yet to see his debut, The Eyes Of My Mother), Piercing is an impressively unique piece of work. Although influenced by a variety of cources, from what I could tell, the most interesting "lift" here is probably the music from Tenebrae,  a piece both familiar and yet not instantly recognisable, and one that feels initially jarring alongside the visuals as you know it doesn't belong there . . . but then it starts to quickly belong there. This sums up the approach that Pesce has to the material, originally a novel by Ryû Murakami, and highlights how much effort he puts into allowing something to retain its individuality while also folding in a mass of other interesting touches.

He's helped immensely by his two leads. Abbott performs with the appropriate amount of oddness, viewing the world around him with a mix of disgust, confusion, and mistrust, while filtering the fact that he's determined to claim a victim back into his brain, you can almost visualise his thought process throughout as he says or does things that feed into either his growing security or growing nerves. Wasikowska is perfect in her role, flitting between vulnerable and potentially very cunning and dangerous, and the strange chemistry with Abbott works well. There are some other people onscreen, with the main one being played by Laia Costa, and they all give very good performances of characters as interpreted by the leads.

A film that I can imagine few people absolutely loving, there's enough here to mark it out as something unforgettable, and singles out Pesce as an impressive talent. The boldness of the content, and his approach to it, is admirable, even when it doesn't all work as well as it could. I'll be checking out the other films from Pesce, and I can see myself revisiting this one when I want an atmospheric and visually impressive mindfuck.

7/10

You can buy the movie here.