This is a comment on a film which has a 21% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

I left off on watching The Grudge (2020) for a while after reading and watching reviews which were fairly damning of it. I probably also figured that another J-horror remake wasn’t something I needed to spend my time on. But pandemics and a severe lack of decent cinema left me with a horror-shaped hole in my life, and until the Candyman reimagining or Prado Bailey Bond’s Censor make it to Japan’s shores (probably sometime in the next decade), I decided to take the plunge.

Takashi Shimizu’s original Juon: The Grudge freaked me out in ways few films have ever done. The idea of an unstoppable malevolent spirit (think Arnie’s Terminator but as a Japanese female evil spirit with longer, more unkempt hair) was something that I found beyond creepy. The first round of American remakes – it was the 2000’s and unlike now Hollywood was short on ideas or the guts to consider original properties – drafted in Sarah Michelle Geller for some Tokyo-based scares while hiring the original’s director for some authenticity. It was absolutely fine. There were hints of a better film but at least it wasn’t One Missed Call. It was followed by a few sequels which lost Geller and gained typically diminishing returns. As horror does.

The idea of a re-imagining has circled horror media for much of the last decade with many treatments promising a return to the wider focus of the original Japanese film and how one house’s tragedy can be one community’s horror. The move to an American setting – weakly done tbh – meant that Pesce’s film could largely avoid the ‘fish out of water giggles’ which had hampered the Geller remake. The focus on the way different characters are cursed through their interactions with the house meant we don’t get one character’s cluttered back story or too much of a focus on an attractive female in peril. Andrea Riseborough’s grief-stricken investigating cop, her new partner and the now emotionally and physically scarred previous investigating officer, an estate agent (John Cho) and his pregnant wife, and an elderly couple (horror stalwarts Betty Gilpin and Frankie Faison) are all damaged by the spirit that’s taken up residence within the house’s walls. There are nods here to what happens to a home once a tragedy has occurred; to how such a tragedy can have far-reaching consequences within the community; to how some people are trapped by modern circumstances in something they know is wrong. There’s no midnight run from the house like in Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982) for these people. Modern life has left Americans ‘shit-out-of-options’ whether their present course of actions are doomed or not. What is the same for dealing with an evil spirit is the same for dealing with the USA’s property market or gouging health-care system. And Happy Fourth of July and all that.

I admit to being something of a fan of Pesce’s previous outing, the also Japan-inspired ‘Piercing’ (2018). I felt that film struggled a little with the source material and felt limited by being forced to operate within a one-room setting. This film largely benefits from the wider cast, even if some points seem unexplored – I’m thinking one character in particular who, through no fault of the actor, really shouldn’t have been bothered with. And on the subject of actors, sometimes the old maxim of not working with children is the right one. But the cast put a lot into their performances with particularly Frankie Faison and John Cho working well with the limitations of being characters in a much larger whole. Kudos also to Demian Bicher for looking every inch the grizzled veteran who’s been weighed down by his job but doesn’t channel any ‘I’m too old for this shit’ shtick.

The Grudge certainly isn’t perfect. But looking at some of the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, I get the feeling that some people are only vaguely aware of a Japanese scary movie 20 or so years ago, have only the most basic idea of what it was about, and did bugger all due diligence before they trod into the screening to watch ‘another J-horror remake’. The Grudge is a damn sight better than such lazy ratings. It requires patience and a willingness to engage with horror in a way beyond surface themes. I even wonder if some of the jump scares – yes, there are jump scares – might have been added post production because test screen audiences simply didn’t find the film scary. Nowadays horror needs to be ‘scary’ for audiences low on imagination, empathy or, dare I say it, intelligence. While horror films like Australian-made Relic deservedly get plaudits for giving audiences credit, other films trying the same thing get lambasted and labeled boring. The Grudge is better than a lot give it credit for; being uncharitable, I’d go so far as to suggest that it’s better than some audiences (and reviewers) deserve.

The Grudge is available on Amazon Prime in some territories.

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