Movie Review: The Grudge

The Grudge

The Grudge had some real pluses in its favor—at least in my book—on opening weekend. First of all, it had a terrific trailer and commercial campaign. It looked really scary. Secondly, I like really scary movies. Which is why the third point was even more important to me: The Grudge was made by the same people responsible for The Ring. And The Ring is the first movie in years that's really and truly frightened me. With all of that to consider, it was a safe bet I'd buy a ticket to The Grudge on opening weekend.

The movie opens with a perfectly ordinary scene between husband and wife, Maria and Peter (Rosa Blasi and Bill Pullman) which turns shocking in short order. But after that brief initial surprise, we're lulled again by the normalcy of the life of an American couple in Tokyo. Karen Davis (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is a foreign exchange student. She lives with her boyfriend, Doug (Jason Behr) who is studying architecture at a Japanese school. To get credit for a class, Karen also volunteers at a local home care center. She's new, but has enough training that her boss Alex (Ted Raimi) decides she's ready for some solo work after Yoko—a regular employee—doesn't show up for work one day.

So Karen takes the subway to the address she's given to care for Yoko's patient, a woman named Emma (Grace Zabriski). Emma lives with her son Matthew (William Mapother) and his wife Jennifer (Clea DuVall) in a beautiful house built very much in the modern Japanese tradition. When Karen arrives, she finds no one at home but the demented Emma who it appears has been left alone long enough to make a real mess in the house. Unnerved, she never-the-less gets on with her work. But during her cleaning chores, she makes a discovery that results in her composure breaking down entirely. She calls her boss for help, but by the time Alex arrives, circumstances at the house are far beyond anything he can repair or even begin to understand.

The Grudge, like The Ring, was a successful Japanese effort remade as an English-language film. Only this time, the Japanese writer and director—Takashi Shimizu—was also tapped to helm the new movie. There's another difference between The Grudge and The Ring, and that's quality of acting. In The Ring, Naomi Watts is incandescent and utterly convincing as the mother desperate to save her child. But in The Grudge, Sarah Michelle Gellar is a poster child for Bad Acting Theatre. Her terror is obviously an act; her confusion, frustration, even her sudden understanding is all exemplified by the same pouty frown. And her interactions with her boyfriend are utterly without spark of any kind. I actually spent time I should have been enjoying increased tension from the film's progress devoted instead to wondering how that cute guy could possibly enjoy being with that wooden girl!

The setting of The Ring was, along with the language, relocated to North America. The Grudge, though, stays in Japan. Obviously filmed on location (the settings were much as I remember the country from my own time there) and employing any number of Japanese actors in significant supporting roles, the ambiance is authentic. But between a script that jumps erratically from past to present and back again, and cultural differences recognizable to me but perhaps not to many Americans, the location actually did a disservice to the film. So, frankly, did the script. Whether that's the fault of translators, or if the story really does lose something in translation, is immaterial to the jarring disjointedness that results.

The special effects are okay; the directing is actually quite good by any standard, and that's bolstered by some examples of truly excellent editing (the title sequence alone is fantastic). But when combined with even more moments of poor editing, a story that never really makes complete sense, and characters whose own performance made them less real and thus less worthy of our concern, well, The Grudge comes out a very poor second to its predecessor. As for scary, I'll admit I jumped a few times. But the jumps were due to classic startle techniques and not to a movie that left me looking behind my back and under the furniture when it was over (The Ring accomplished that quite handily, thank you). Perhaps The Grudge was lost in translation. Or maybe the movie suffers from the fact it's really just a tired old ghost story with its only twist being that of location. Either way, it's not enough to save this film.

FAMILY SUITABILITY: The Grudge is rated PG-13 for "mature thematic material, disturbing images, violence, [and] some sexuality." Despite the fact I didn't find the movie particularly scary, a small child most certainly would. Adults may enjoy the Japanese setting and some moments of cinematic skill scattered throughout. But in the main, The Grudge seems best suited to me to be a young teens' date movie, where the girls can jump (though not too often), and the boys can pretend to be brave (with very little effort needed to do so).