Rent The Grudge (2020)

Unscary Horror - The Grudge review by GI

A reboot, remake, part of the series? Who knows? This is another in the cycle of the vengeful ghost films that have never surpassed the Japanese original. The trouble here is, whilst there's lots of gore, maggoty corpses and nasty ghosts emerging from the shadows, none of it feels particularly scary. Andrea Riseborough tries her best in the lead role but ultimately this offers nothing but the expected bathtub death that seems to be a franchise trademark and an interesting timeline structure. The story starts in Tokyo, perhaps more as a homage to the original, and then zips quickly to the US where a decomposed body is found in a car and Detective Muldoon (Riseborough) investigates. She finds there are links to a house where a woman killed her family and then herself and which Muldoon's partner has issues. These events are all caused by a vengeful, curse ridden ghost that attacks anyone who enters the house. As said the events never amount to much that's scary other than the discovery of corpses in various states or decomposition or with horrible injuries, and it just goes for cattle prod jump scares and why oh why does everyone have such dim houselights!! A bit of a disappointment really and certainly not a film that will appeal to any other than fans of horror.

A passable horror thriller that's too vague to stick in the brain - The Grudge review by BG

Despite its pedigree of production team ('Don't Breathe' and 'Evil Dead') and some good acting talent, 'Grudge' is a high-end movie in search of a plot. The direction is efficient, but never particularly inspired or exciting. The thrills are gently unnerving and weird, rather than terrifying, and the predictability is huge.

After a woman encounters a curse in Japan, she brings it back with her to the USA as an excuse to expand the franchise - I mean, by accident...ahem - and the film goes to some fairly entertaining lengths to hop around the various chains of lethal events that this unleashes.

Andrea Riseborough is magnetic and enjoyable as the single mother and cop who gets hooked in by the case, and Demian Bichir is solid as the new partner who's hiding a secret. The rest of the cast are good, but are never given an enormous amount of room to do anything with rather standard horror roles, and only John Cho's likeable estate agent sticks in the memory very much, although Jacki Weaver is good fun as a good Samaritan trying to help with a tragic situation, and Lin Shaye brings her usual enjoyable performance to a role she could now do in her sleep.

Unfortunately the script is loose (a mere week or two after seeing it, I struggle to remember exactly why some of the plot threads matter except to bulk out the running time), and much like the earlier American Grudge movies, the reason for the curse and the character/motives behind it are so vacuous and ill-defined that I have no real sense of why the curse came about or why it's so difficult for the victims to shake - the reasons for the level of malevolence involved are explained breathtakingly poorly, and don't convey to the audience in any way. Amorphous threats can be conveyed brilliantly by scripting, dialogue or atmosphere - think 'The Omen', or 'Final Destination' - but this just doesn't seem to think it matters.

The scares are 'okay' - they mostly rely on vaguely grotesque-looking characters pulling faces behind a window or in a doorway as a character looks away and fails to spot them, and attempts at such jump-scares are peppered fairly talentlessly through the film. The movie has better success at creating a vague sense of unease and Riseborough's horrified expression combines with the direction at some key moments to sell her shock or alarm.

However, as horror thrillers go, this is fuzzy and forgettable, not a future classic.