If these walls could talk, they'd say all kinds of crazy stuff. That's the only message I've interpreted behind the Grudge franchise, which is the story of a haunted Japanese house. The iconic image of a pallid, skinny ghost with long, dripping black hair obscuring its face is chilling enough for some people, but its essence is what scares me. It's a vengeful spirit, created from a curse that spawns wherever someone dies badly, "in the grip of a powerful rage." The curse is, of course, the supernatural grudge of the title. Far from the divine justice of a Western deity, this curse metes out its cruel justice on those who stumble upon it: housed in its proximal location, it spiritually rots the house in question and manifests itself in various ways over time, resulting in a series of other bad deaths.
While I thought this newest installment of the franchise would be a sort of reboot or remake of the original Ju-On, it is in fact a sort of spin-off sequel. As it takes place in the US, I imagine the filmmakers conceptually see it as parallel to the regular sequels of the Grudge story. The curse of the house in Tokyo haunted by Kayako in the original is unwittingly transported to America by a live-in nurse who returns home. Disturbed by the horrors she witnessed, she is increasingly driven mad by the curse that has clung to her until she kills her family and herself. Then their ghosts haunt the next inhabitants of the house.
Here we don't see Kayako herself except at the beginning -- at least I don't think so, though some of the ghosts look similar enough and croak just like that bad bitch -- but that's okay because we get a host of new spooks to savor. After the nurse's family, we get John Cho and Betty Gilpin, sad because their baby is due to be born with a bad disease (ALD, which I had to Google during the film and still don't understand entirely). After John Cho visits the house and is attacked by its former inhabitants, he returns home to his pregnant wife and kills her and then himself; it seems he is possessed by the curse. Not long after, elderly couple Lin Shaye and Frankie Faison move in, dealing with dementia and terminal illness. Tryin to cope with his own emotional turmoil, Frankie calls Jacki Weaver in to help his wife commit suicide and end their suffering. And, as you might imagine, the ghosts attack them too.
I've never been much of a fan of the few J-Horror entries I've seen. It's mostly a matter of personal taste, as the vengeful ghost story just isn't something I find especially disturbing; at least, not when it involves a wet, gaunt specter or a zombified poltergeist. In this franchise specifically, while I really like the idea of dying badly causing a house curse, I've found the mythology a little to vague and the rules too flexible. This new installment, for example, exists purely as a result of some rules that bend its own premise: the curse of the Tokyo house haunted by Kayako in the original gets transported (or perhaps spreads?) to America, having used a live-in nurse as the unwitting courier. Later, as the stories of the new haunted house take form, we see that the ghosts follow their victims outside the house walls but only sometimes. The lack of consistency here is troubling, both in terms of innate plot holes and being unpredictably scary.
Its heavy reliance on jump-scares will no doubt earn it few fans, but I remained consistently disturbed by several elements of this Grudge that endeared me to it more than to any others in its franchise. It, like the original, works wonders with its nonlinear storytelling, but here it makes a strong case for a non-Western understanding of time and emotional intelligence. The dialogue itself, in one crucial scene, supports the narrative organization, which is brilliant. It also is the first Grudge I've seen to be truly, deeply ugly in its theme and character. Others have featured unhappy people, I suppose, but each new family in this film is dealing with staple hot-topic issues that are altogether unpleasant. Similarly, they all meet surprisingly violent and graphic deaths that we fully see on screen. We see bodies splatter multiple times, and frankly I just wasn't ready for it after all the ghost-faces popping out and gloomy, moody, slow camera machinations. After seeing these brief moments, I totally understood why these ghosts are upset.
But none more so than Andrea Riseborough and Demian Bichir, whose unlikely pairing here serves as a knockout audition for the next season of True Detective. They are both so miserable it's hard to entirely root for them, because we know they're past the point of no return. Paired together in the precinct, Andrea begins to investigate the house, perhaps to distract herself from her husband's recent death. Demian discourages this, as he lost his former partner to a manic obsession with the house and its curse that led to his near-suicide and insanity. And while no characters in this movie are around long enough for a dynamic arc, Andrea suitably carries the heart of the story right up to the end, when she's caught in a new haunted house and, I think, royally fucked by the curse she thought she destroyed.
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