The Grudge (2020)
By The Gorilla
This review contains spoilers
As my friend Corona is raging against the machines, I am choking on my laughter thinking about Disney charging its own customers an extra thirty dollars to watch Mulan (2020) on Disney +, a platform fans are already paying for.
Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest –
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest –
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
And while the chanting Disney fans turned to buccaneering, I watched one of the few movies that managed to actually come out this year, The Grudge (2020) by Nicolas Pesce. I watched it alone, however, because my girlfriend the Panda hates horror films and still hates me for having pushed her to watch Sinister (2012) with me. Ah, l’amour!
I clearly gained some kilos during the lockdown (I’m getting my nice and heavy winter fur on), and when I sat on the sofa, the springs creaked and groaned. I brought the basket of alcoholic bananas and placed it next to me. DVD in, lights out, doors closed, and here we go.
Now, I have been a fan of the Japanese Ju-On: The Grudge franchise since its inception (I met Kayako at a convention of Sadako’s look-alike and she’s lovely; her son, a bit less), and I always found the American remakes to be enjoyable if bland. No matter how many sequels the studios churn out, I am always going to look forward to watching them. So, when they announced this one, I was gripped. And gripped I was to the armchair, as the movie whiled away, in a titanic effort to stay awake.
The story begins in Tokyo, where Kayako makes a quick cameo to justify the name on the poster and satisfy her contractual obligations. We are then sent back to the States (the hell with those Japs). Here is where the good stuff happens and if any of you fans was hoping to meet Kayako and her son again, too bad for you. You won’t see them, even with binoculars. Instead, we are stuck with their discounted counterparts, a generic Western ghost that is in equal parts typical ghosty makeup and horror cliché. And this ghost doesn’t really do much either as the Ju-On curse now drives people to kill themselves and their loved ones remotely.
In comes Detective Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough), who clearly isn’t your typical police woman with a tragic backstory, oh no, she is also blonde. She decides to satisfy her desire for gossip and, against the suggestion of her aggressively slacker partner Detective Goodman (Demián Bichir), starts investigating a series of tragedies and murders all seemingly connected to one house. Because when you want to see paranormal, paranormal is what you’ll see. This paves the way to a series of interconnected stories told in flashbacks, where the lack of reason and sense is the common thread, all leading up to a predictably lackluster and anticlimactic conclusion, where the events discussed already throughout the film are reproduced like a particularly bloody episode of History Channel. Truly sciatica-inducing. The final scene also slightly varies depending on which version you had the misfortune to buy, the one for Americans or the one for non-Americans. And the American one is slightly better.
So here are the things the movie does really wrong: a nonsensical plot, an overabundance of genre tropes (i.e. jump scares and people walking quickly in the background), a lazy sound design, talking-heads galore, and that abortion of a plebeian editing job, which manages to make a thin story thinner, shaves away any tri-dimensionality the characters might have had, and gets rid of that pesky continuity and logic. God damn it.
But let’s see these bad boys up closely.
From the beginning, The Grudge is a clichés fest, with the hand of Kayako ripping through a trash bag to ankle-pick nurse Fiona Landers (read it as Flanders the first time), interpreted by Tara Westwood. Premising that the jump scare was preceded by a customary moment of silence, which gave away the effect, the moment itself was poorly edited. The editor used two shots (a Close Up and a Medium), sped them up, and slapped them together to make the clip look more violent and sudden. All this goes to show that either the director or the producer was not confident that they could have scared the audience by letting the moment play out by itself on screen. And if the only way you think you are going to keep the viewers interested is not through a good story and carefully built tension, but by using quickly edited, loud jump scares, then your movie is in trouble. Because what is the natural conclusion to desensitizing your audience to your only scary trick? That by the time you need the trick to work, no one is scared anymore.
I greeted the first scene with a sigh that only kept getting louder as the movie proceeded. The Panda walked in to check on me, shook her head, and left.
Another thing The Grudge did religiously was showing people or supernatural presences doing everything but back-flipping in the background without really affecting the course of the events. As a spectator (a hairy and strong one at that), it is hard to be afraid when most of the bizarre occurrences happen in the background without affecting the characters. When something is shown and the character isn’t aware of it, that means it is for the audience. This can be a great tool to build up tension and giants like Hitchcock used it to great effect, but it worked because there was a situation of cause and effect. The spectators saw something threatening the character didn’t, like a bomb underneath the table, and they knew it was going to explode. So they waited on the edge of their seat wondering if the character was going to notice it in time or not. In any way a detonation was inevitable. Now, if Detective Muldoon doesn’t notice the ghost quickly tiptoeing behind her back and then goes on about her day without anything serious happening, how am I supposed to be scared?
So this gorilla says: use the creepy plot and sound design to initially build up tension and only insert jump scares later on when the ghostly presences start affecting the life of the protagonist. In brief, use the jump scares sparingly. Regarding the ghosts hula hooping in the background, anytime they appear there should be serious consequences for the character involved in the scene.
Next stop, sound design. Director Nicolas Pesce is terrified of silence whenever is not used to introduce jump scares, and underlines every emotional moment with predictable stock music, which all but connects the audience with the characters. Ironically, if he had only dared to leave some shots play out a little longer, he would not have needed such a heavy-handed approach to drama. Let this gorilla register the information you are feeding him and he will naturally feel the emotions of a scene.
Also, there is way too much verbal as opposed to visual exposition. Not only that, every line could be given to any of the characters and it wouldn’t change a thing: none of them has their own voice. The majority of dialogues exist purely to dish out easily digestible facts about characters and events happening in the film. There is literally a scene where Detective Muldoon is reading the dossier about the homicide that happened in the supposedly cursed house and some random policeman walks in and says: “Put those files away before so-and-so sees you. He never set foot in the house, never seen a cop do that before.” And leaves. Just like that.
Come on Nicolas, there is no way you can do worse than that! Also, why was Muldoon looking up information about the house on Google if she had already access to all the police files—as shown in the next scene?
The acting, save for the great Jacki Weaver, is mostly passable and often awkward. Particularly, scenes with Detective Muldoon and her son Burke (John J. Hansen) look as if they had not been given enough time to rehearse and get acquainted with each other. Also, I got to give it to Hansen, with his performance as the apathetic amoeba he really did his best to carve himself a place in the annals of God-Damn-I-Hate-This-Kid. Right there with Kevin McCallister, other youthful smart-assess, and seven-year-old cynical philosophers.
The film does, however, have a few things going on for itself. The gory moments work greatly—but they only serve as a reminder of how this movie could have been. Shot in the classically luscious 2.39:1 aspect ratio using Panavision anamorphic lenses, before being bleach bypassed in post-production, the image is crisp and cold. Together with the production design, it builds the right atmosphere for a story set in our world but still belonging to the realm of fantasy.
In conclusion, The Grudge is all howling and no bite.
And with that, it’s time for a very gorilla sleep, hoping that Corona will be done soon.
The Gorilla watches movies, The Gorilla thinks, The Gorilla does reviews. He is very opinionated, which sometimes drives his girlfriend, The Panda, crazy. He also likes alcoholic bananas, back scratches, and long naps in the sun.
