Credit where credit is due, Nicolas Pesce’s The Grudge reboot is certainly more grotesque than Takashi Shimizu’s 2004 American remake of his Japanese-language horror film Ju-On: The Grudge. Pesce fills his J-horror revival with ghastly imagery of maggot-riddled corpses, vengeful ghosts dripping wet with blood and/or filthy bathwater (The Grudge’s most iconic motif returns here), gruesome acts of violence, and blood-splattering suicides that treat human bodies like sacks of meat to be blown to pieces. Unfortunately, leaning hard into an R-rating isn't enough to revitalize the franchise's worn-out formula of having people unwittingly enter a "grudged" building and being harassed by the ghosts who live there until, one presumes, they grow bored and decide to murder them. Although it tries to revive the brand by including new ingredients and extra gore, The Grudge reboot is mostly a grosser rehash of what's come before.
The Grudge is composed of three interweaving stories set in a small town in Pennsylvania from 2004-06. The main one follows newly-widowed Detective Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough) as she investigates a mysterious death linked to a disturbing case her partner, Detective Goodman (Demián Bichir), worked on a couple years earlier. A separate one revolves around real estate agent Peter Spencer (John Cho) as he and his wife Nina (Betty Gilpin) process some unsettling news about their unborn child. Finally, the last one concerns Lorna Moody (Jacki Weaver), an assisted suicide worker who aspires to help an elderly man named William Matheson (Frankie Faison) and his wife Faith (Lin Shaye), whose mind has faded. All three are connected through a house where a grisly murder took place after one of the people who lived there returned from a business-related trip to Japan (hint, hint).
With a little extra development, any one of The Grudge reboot's storylines could potentially sustain an entire film (the plot thread with the Mathesons alone is a bit like Michael Haneke's Amour, but with more murder ghosts). And while they share the theme of characters dealing with real-world ailments and fears, the movie quickly pushes those concerns aside in order to focus more on its supernatural horror threats. It's the same issue cowriter Jeff Buhler's scripts for last year's The Prodigy and Pet Sematary remake had; they introduce truly scary villains like illness and the inevitability of death, but pay much more attention to their fantasy monster elements. As a result, the characters and emotions in The Grudge end up lacking depth and the movie too often boils down to a series of thinly-sketched dramatic interactions punctuated by perfunctory jump scares.
Pesce, who rewrote Buhler's earlier draft after coming aboard to direct, tries to compensate for this by making the reboot's new ghosts and deaths a lot more disgusting than those from The Grudge movies past. That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's seen his previous two films (The Eyes of My Mother and Piercing), but it doesn't make The Grudge spooky so much as merely bloody and inadvertently campy during some of the more over-the-top nasty scenes. Pesce's efforts to further spice things up by integrating some Se7en-inspired cop drama into the mix doesn't pan out either since there's no real mystery to be solved and what few story twists there are can be spotted well ahead of time. Even the movie's stylistic flourishes come across as more of a hodgepodge and less like Pesce is angling to evoke a specific sub-genre of horror the way he did with his prior work.
To give him his due, Pesce made the wise choice of filling out his film's ensemble with talented character actors. The Grudge cast does their best to make the most of the material they're given, and the performances are overall stronger than one might expect from the reboot of a flailing horror franchise. All the same, most of the supporting players feel under-used, and a few of the characters border uncomfortably on stereotypes; Goodman, specifically, has grown religious as he's aged - an idea the movie "subtly" shows by revealing his car's glove compartment is full of Jesus artwork and having him watch faith-based films. Shaye, however, appears to be having a good time playing Faith, and she tends to be responsible for The Grudge's most unintentionally ridiculous, yet also entertaining moments.
It's possible an earlier version of The Grudge was better able to use its blood-thirsty ghosts as a metaphor for the real-life problems its characters are dealing with, before much of its substance was dropped from the theatrical cut (which has a pretty short runtime). Either way, the movie's attempts to expand The Grudge's mythology generally don't work, and its stabs at being grittier and more realistic than the films before it are undone by its over-reliance on bloodshed and just plain unpleasant details for shock value. Between this and 2016's The Ring reboot, Rings, these old J-horror remake IPs seem to have run out of gas and are probably best left in the past - lest their curse spread any further.
The Grudge is now playing in U.S. theaters nationwide. It is 94 minutes long and is rated R for disturbing violence and bloody images, terror and some language.
