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Jan 3, 2020 · Nick Allen January 03, 2020. Tweet. Now streaming on: Powered by JustWatch. This year in film starts with a tricky prospect—a brutal arthouse director handling a studio project (good) that’s also the second American remake of a half-scary 2002 Japanese movie (not promising). Can you recommend a horror movie based on its impressive meanness?
Jan 3, 2020 · Rated: 2/5 Jan 30, 2020 Full Review Clarisse Loughrey Independent (UK) The Grudge could have been something much more than just another notch in a never-ending franchise. As it is, the film...
- (716)
- Nicolas Pesce
- R
- Andrea Riseborough
Oct 21, 2004 · Reviews. Easy to hold 'Grudge' against fragmented, formulaic film. Roger Ebert October 21, 2004. Tweet. Sarah Michelle Gellar, a veteran of horror films, finds herself in a haunted house in "The Grudge." Now streaming on: Powered by JustWatch. "The Grudge" has a great opening scene, I'll grant you that.
Oct 22, 2004 · With that bias noted, The Grudge was scary, creepy, gross, good acting, script interesting, and special effects solid. Some action, drama, and scares. Actually, the whole cast overall was...
- (18.5K)
- Takashi Shimizu
- PG-13
- Sarah Michelle Gellar
Jan 3, 2020 · The Grudge (2020) Review: This Franchise Isn't Cursed, It's Out of Gas. By Sandy Schaefer. Published Jan 3, 2020. Link copied to clipboard. Credit where credit is due, Nicolas Pesce’s The Grudge reboot is certainly more grotesque than Takashi Shimizu’s 2004 American remake of his Japanese-language horror film Ju-On: The Grudge.
- This dreary and dull reboot of the Grudge franchise is a rough way for horror fans to begin a new decade.
- The 25 Best Horror Movies
- Verdict
By Kristy Puchko
Updated: Apr 28, 2020 10:09 pm
Posted: Jan 3, 2020 10:15 pm
With his 2016 directorial debut The Eyes Of My Mother, writer/helmer Nicolas Pesce had critics championing him as a bold new voice in horror for his black-and-white cinematography, dread-entrenched character study, and its bleak tale of love, isolation, and violence. In 2018, he returned to the spotlight of the Sundance Film Festival with Piercing, a horror-thriller about an aspiring killer and the sex worker he's eying to be his victim. Now, this on-the-rise horror auteur returns to put his mark on a once-hot horror franchise with the star-stuffed, studio offering The Grudge. But horror fans might wish Pesce had let dead things stay dead. This Grudge is a trudge through muck, meandering plot, half-baked performances, and tired tropes that should’ve been retired by the end of the 2000s.
Spooked by the bad vibes of the haunted Japanese home, American caretaker Fiona Landers (Tara Westwood) decides to return to her family in Pennsylvania. But too late! She already carries the plague of that place and so infects her big, beautiful house, her bearded husband, and her long-haired little girl. The plot leaps from Fiona's arrival home to two years later, where a widowed mother juggles parenting her grieving kid and her job as a police detective. The discovery of a rotten and horrifically injured corpse raises questions that connect to a horrid series of strange murders. Fascinated, Detective Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough) sets out to solve the cases.
As she investigates, the film jumps between 2004, where the Landers tragedy spills into the lives of a pair of married realtors (John Cho and Glow's Betty Gilpin), then to 2005, where married retirees (Lin Shaye and Frankie Faison) face a terrible choice, then back to 2006, where Muldoon is trying to put the pieces together. She will. Pesce will not.
This convoluted plot with its non-linear flows feels like both a retread of the remake and a cheap means of upping the body count and scare set pieces. All the jumping back and forth can be a bit confusing. And when half of the characters are introduced as corpses, it’s hard to get too invested in their arcs, no matter how much melodrama about assisted suicide, prenatal complications, single parenting or mourning come into play.
It all feels like filler stuffed between supposedly spooky sequences that lean heavily on ghoulish gore and predictable jump scares. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before: A glimpse of a ghost in the reflection of a bathroom mirror. A glaring specter who vanishes once the lights are switched on. And of course, pale women with long, dark, wet hair obscuring their faces. At least Pesce made them white so that this American snatching of J-horror is less glaringly xenophobic.
There’s nothing fresh, exciting, or particularly unique about Nicolas Pesce’s take on The Grudge. His passion for character-focused drama fails to spark in a barrage of scenes that feel like tedious outtakes from Lifetime movies. The sharp style critics praised him for bringing to The Eyes of My Mother and Piercing is translated through a color pal...
Jan 3, 2020 · Pointless horror reboot has lots of blood, jump scares. Read Common Sense Media's The Grudge (2020) review, age rating, and parents guide.
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