'The Grudge' Review—A Bland Reboot

Hollywood has an unwritten tradition of releasing a terrible horror movie in the first week of January; in previous years, we've had Escape Room, Insidious: The Last Key, The Forest, and The Woman In Black 2: The Angel of Death. This year's bad horror film? The Grudge.

Nicolas Pesce writes and directs this reboot/sequel/reimagining of the 2004 remake of the Japanese horror movie, Ju-On: The Grudge. Because in a world where remakes are rampant and original ideas are scarce, Hollywood has decided to remake a remake.

This film takes place at the same time and universe as the Sarah Michelle Gellar Grudge movies but focuses on a new story of a murder that takes place in a house that leads to a vengeful ghost that haunts whoever enters.

Now, January is generally a dump month for movies, and most films released this month are critically panned. And a movie like The Grudge is a shining example of an awful January film.

This movie is a generic, cliché horror movie that doesn't do anything special for the genre. It attempts to put a new twist on The Grudge series, but it is a bad movie that you'll likely forget about an hour after finishing it.

Horror films are always written with a goal—scare the audience. A horror movie without scares is like a comedy without laughs; unfortunately, if this movie were a comedy, the audience would be dead silent.

While this film pays homage to certain scenes in the original Grudge, from a scene in a shower to a security tape scene, the horror sequences are lacking in anything that can genuinely frighten its audience.

The original Grudge movies directed by Takashi Shimizu were effective in their scary scenes due to its unsettling ideas and frightening designs. However, this film relies on very cheap jump scares to scare people.

Some have compared using jump scares to make an audience scared to tickling someone to make them laugh; this analogy is very relevant to this film, as the scary scenes mostly consist of the camera cutting to a frightening face accompanied by a loud noise.

Every time the ghosts appear, they vanish in the very next shot. Because of this, the jump scares become very predictable and repetitive, as the scary scenes don't move the story forward.

Furthermore, since the ghosts appear for very brief moments at a time and don't do very much to the main characters, they don't have a frightening presence because of their confusing goals and their simple design.

Instead of inducing a looming feeling of terror, the ghosts are generic horror movie villains who are more invested in jumping out and surprising its characters than actually doing anything to them.

Additionally, the film commits multiple horror clichés, from many scenes of sneaking around a quiet, empty house to the nosebleed to a cell phone that just always rings at the wrong time. Because of this, the movie doesn't distinguish itself from the many other films that have very similar scenes.

The film's story is quite subpar. Like the other Grudge films, it is told in a nonlinear structure, and it follows several storylines all surrounding the house. However, the nonlinear structure offers very few surprises, nor are there any unique twists and ideas with this method of storytelling.

Other nonlinear films such as Memento and Pulp Fiction rely on the story structure to give the audience surprises and unexpected ideas. In contrast, this film only shows us a car in the woods, for example, and then later shows us the scenes that led up to it.

Much of the film's plot is very generic for a horror movie—it's a haunted house film that gives us a slightly different story for The Grudge franchise, but a very familiar story for the horror genre.

But what about the characters? This film gives the series some new characters, and yet, none of them are memorable. Pesce mistook "character development" for "sad backstory," and while each of them has a conflict, the events surrounding the house don't push the characters in darker, more fascinating places.

Without a doubt, the best part of the film is the performances. John Cho, Lin Shaye, and William Sadler give excellent performances, while everyone else is passable, despite being a bit bland in their roles.

Pesce's talent behind the camera shows during certain sequences throughout the film. At times, he uses the background of his shots in a Carpenter-esque style, but his potential is wasted on cheap jump scares and a mediocre script.

The cinematography and editing of the film are quite good. Still, this movie, unfortunately, failed to breathe any new life into a dying horror film series due to overall lackluster execution.

One of the prominent pieces of marketing with this film is the fact that it is a rated R horror film, as opposed to the PG-13 Grudge films released in the 2000s. There was even a red band trailer for this movie.

However, this film feels very tame for an R-rated horror movie. Besides a few scenes with some blood, much of the film feels PG-13.

Furthermore, the film only contains one F-bomb, which is the limit for a PG-13 movie, so it feels as if this was a PG-13 script that became rated R during reshoots and in the editing room at the request of studio executives.

Because of the film's overall lack of scares, this is a very forgettable horror movie that will be forgotten by audiences by the end of the week. It pales in comparison to Ju-On, the original Japanese film that this movie aspires to match in quality.

While I can appreciate how Pesce tried to put a different twist on the story of The Grudge with a different setting and characters, the fact that this movie isn't scary causes this film to miss the mark in terms of its storytelling and direction.

But given that this film came out in the first week of January, it should be what audiences have come to expect.

Final Score: The Grudge — 4/10 (D+)

As if the release date wasn't enough of a harbinger of doom, reviews for the film didn't go up until the night the movie was released. That's never a good sign, which is why you should skip this movie.

If you want to see a good movie out in theaters right now, check out Little Women or Uncut Gems. Or wait a week and watch 1917 or Just Mercy. Whatever you do, steer clear of this film.