In short: The Grudge (2020)

For the first twenty minutes of its run time or so, I was all hyped to complain that Nicolas Pesce’s new US version of the classic (and still terribly creepy and disturbing) Japanese Ju-On franchise is not as bad as I was led to believe by the rest of the internet. However, I left that impression by the wayside rather quickly once the film started in earnest on its long, slow, tedious and pretty pointless slog through various flashbacks and two very slow police investigations whose structural mirroring may have sounded clever during the development of the script, but in practice simply doubles the tedium for very little reason. Well, there’s one line in the script that attempts to actually provide a reason for the film’s mind-numbing structure, but one single line that’s also supposed to explain the film’s thin thematic throughline to the audience does hardly distract from the fact the structure simply doesn’t add anything to the film; nor from how little the film actually does with its theme of grief and threatened and doomed family ties.

Sure, the Japanese films of the series often do something comparable – though actually more complicated because those are not just flashbacks - structurally, but in those films, the structure puts an extra emphasis on the inevitability of the characters’ eventual doom, where Pesce’s movie only emphasises how darn repetitive the film is. And honestly, the various shock scenes aren’t worth repeating, mostly going for watered down versions of the Japanese originals, replacing the highly characteristic creatures of the Japanese film with generic “revenant versions of former victims of the curse” that are just painfully bland, as well as ineffectively used.


Given the two good to great films Pesce made before this, I’m a bit disturbed that “bland” and “tedious” are the main descriptors I have for his attempt at a more mainstream horror affair. So that’s a success, right?